BEFORE THE TRUMPET YOUNG FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT 1882-1905

, dig upon thousands of original doc
uments, many of them never before ex
amined, the former editor of American
Heritage magazine presents an entirely
new picture of Franklin Roosevelt's early
life and of the forces that shaped his un
forgettable personality.

Before the Trumpet is first of all the
story of a handsome, pampered, but
strong-willed youth and of the rich and
rarified world in which he was brought
up on the Hudson River and in Europe,
at Groton and Harvard and Campobello.

It reveals his little-understood father,
Jarnes, to have been a daring speculator as
well as a country squire, a warm and vig
orous source of his son's humor and pas
sion for politics. The book traces for the
first time Franklin's tangled relationship
with his remarkable mother, Sara Delano
Roosevelt, who was largely responsible for
the sense of self-assurance that served him
so well during the two worst crises any
president has faced since the Civil War,
but whose overweening love also threat
ened to smother his ambition and inde
pendence. The effort to become his own
man without wounding her fostered in
him much of the guile and easy charm,
love of secrecy, and skill at maneuver he
brought to the White House.

But the book also tells the story of
FDR's big, vivid clan:

Wa ''-en Delano, his grandfather, the
mat : < x* one-eyed patriarch whose great
forti K was secretly built in the opium
tratki

"Rosy,,"* rrtnklin's little-known half-
brother, vho;, ' showy sportsman's life
among th : 'V; < \ "s and at 1 he ; n rts of

(cott'li*n <(/<;' /v j , i ; ',

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BEFORE THE TRUMPET

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT AT SEVENTEEN

BEFORE

THE TRUMPET

Young Franklin Roosevelt

GEOFFREY C. WARD

1817

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, New York

Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London
Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney

For my mother and father

Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs arc courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
at Hyde Park.

BEFORE THE TRUMPET. Copyright 1985 by Geoffrey C. Ward. All rights reserved. Printed in
the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd
Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Limited, Toronto.

FIRST EDITION

Designer: Sidney Feinberg

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Ward, Geoffrey C.
Before the trumpet.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945
Childhood and youth. 2. Presidents United States-
Biography. I. Title.

E807.W327 1985 973.917'092'4 [Bl 84-48755

ISBN 0-06-015451-9

85 86 87 88 89 HC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Preface vii

PrologllC: THE RIVER ROAD 1

1. MR. JAMES 13

2. ALGONAC 61

3. THE VERY NICE CHILD 109

4. THE LOVING CONSPIRACY 144

5. GETTING ON VERY WELL WITH THE FELLOWS 178

6. UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF HIS MOTHER 210

7. E IS AN ANGEL 258

8. KEEPING THE NAME IN THE FAMILY 314

Acknowledgments 343

Source Notes 347

Bibliography 369

Index 379

Illustrations follow pages 214 and 310

PREFACE

Three years ago, it was part of my job as the editor of American
Heritage magazine to help decipher secret recordings made by Frank
lin D, Roosevelt in the Oval Office of the White House in the autumn
of 1940. As I eavesdropped, fascinated, on the private conversations of
the most important President of this century, I was struck above all by
the tireless ebullience with which FDR seemed to face the world.
Despite the muffled, primitive recording, despite the crackling and
static of forty years of disintegration, the vibrancy of his extraordinary
personality comes through undirnmed. There he sits imprisoned in
his chair, locked in political combat with Wendell Willkie, the most
formidable opponent ever sent against him, facing the worst war in
history and he couldn't be having a better time. Nothing seems to
faxe him. He is amused and amusing, apparently unafraid of anything,
and somehow serene in the conviction that whatever happens, every
thing will turn out fine, provided he's in charge.

That unshakable energy and optimism served him and his country
well during the two most serious crises Americans have faced since the
Civil War, But, I wondered as I listened, where did that self-assurance
come from?

This book is an attempt at answering that question. It seeks the
sources of Franklin Roosevelt's vivid personality its boldness and
caution, its deviousness and charm and underlying confidence where
common sense dictates they must be found, in his youth and young

PREFACE

manhood. It is about the pre-eminent American politician of modern
times, but it is not about politics. Nor is it a conventional full-scale
biography. It begins long before its subject was born and ends in 1905
on the day of his marriage; in a second volume I hope to carry the story
through his steely decision to return to political life despite his paraly
sis. It is the story of young Franklin Roosevelt, but it is also the story
of the big uncommon family that helped shape him. It is based so far
as is possible more than a century after many of the events it describes
on primary sources; no historian is quoted anywhere in its pages,
though the work of earlier biographers inevitably informs every page.

GEOFFREY C. WARD
New York City
November 25, 1984

Too often is the biographer tempted to confine himself to that comparatively
brief period after the trumpet of fame has directed the eyes of the world upon
him whose life story he writes. But to understand properly the greatness or
littleness of any man we must know something of his whole life what went
before and what went after.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

I have always been a great believer in heredity.

SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT

Franklin, Jr., and I had a very quiet afternoon and evening. He started me
off on telling him stories about various members of the family whom he is too
young to know anything about, After a while he remarked, "I think families
are the most interesting things in the world," which of course is true, for in
the story of every family is the stuff from which both novels and eventually
history is written.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, My Day, 1938

PROLOGUE

THE RIVER ROAD

FDR was furious, "The old body snatcher," he muttered as his limou
sine moved along the wet street toward the White House. "The old
body snatcher."

It was Sunday morning, March 4, 1934, cold and rainy in Washing
ton, and the President was coming home from church. The Right
Reverend James E. Freeman, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington,
had invited Roosevelt and his Cabinet to attend a special service at the
National Cathedral to celebrate the first anniversary of the President's
inauguration. FDR, a lifelong churchman and senior warden of his
own church, St. James, at Hyde Park, New York, had agreed to come.

Things had not gone well Word got around that the President was
to be there, and when he arrived many of the pews were already filled
with tourists who stood and pointed and talked among themselves
right through the service. Roosevelt resented being the focus of atten
tion in church, "I can do almost anything in the goldfish bowl of the
President's life/' he once said, "but I'll be hanged if I can say my
prayers in it. It bothers me to feel like something in the zoo," 1

But it was what had happened after services ended that had angered

1. Roosevelt later became more relaxed about the inevitable attention his churchgoing
received,
lettered j
Oni
Roosevelt roared.

Source: Olin Dows, Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, p. 66,

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

him. At sixty-seven, Bishop Freeman was more than twice as old as the
great unfinished Gothic monument over which he presided. Its corner
stone had been laid in 1901, and the struggle to raise funds with which
to complete it had grown more difficult as the Depression deepened.
The bishop refused to be discouraged, however; the cathedral was the
capstone of his life's work in the church. He was determined to make
it a truly national institution, an American Westminster Abbey, where
presidents came to worship and eminent citizens were laid to rest in
its crypt of the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea.

Roosevelt's attendance this Sunday understandably delighted him,
and as the President made his slow, stiff-legged way up the aisle,
smiling at the congregation while gripping the arm of his sturdy
uniformed naval aide, Captain Walter Vernon, the bishop waited at the
door to escort him to his car.

The men shook hands and Roosevelt complimented him on the
aptness of his sermon and the beauty of his church. The bishop
thanked the President for coming; his presence honored the cathedral,
he said, and he hoped he would return often. Then, leaning closer, he
reminded FDR that several distinguished Americans already rested in
the cathedral crypt, Woodrow Wilson and Admiral George Dewey
among them. When the time came, Bishop Freeman continued, he
hoped President Roosevelt would consent to join them.

Roosevelt kept smiling. The bishop pushed on. He knew how busy
the President must be in these difficult times. It was so easy to let things
slip one's mind. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt would be good enough to
dictate a memorandum expressing his wish to be buried here just so
there would be no misunderstanding later on.

The President continued to smile as he was helped into his automo
bile, and he waved at the crowd standing in the rain on the cathedral
steps until they could no longer see him. But he had been- deeply
offended. If he died in office, he told his staff back at the White I louse,
he wanted no part of Bishop Freeman or his cathedral. There might
be a simple ceremony in the East Room, just as there had been for
several of his predecessors, but he would be buried at home, of course,
at Hyde Park. In his mother's rose garden.

Several months later, taking his friend and Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins for a drive around Springwood, the family estate at
Hyde Park, he stopped his open car outside the tall hemlock hedge that
enclosed the garden. "That's where I'm going to be buried, Frances,"

Prologue: The River Road 3

he said. "Don't you ever let anyone try to bury me in any cathedral" 2
On December 22, 1937, the newspapers announced that former
Secretary of State Frank Kellogg had died the day before at his home
in Minnesota. The funeral was to be held there, but the body was to
be shipped to Washington for burial beneath the National Cathedral.
Bishop Freeman, FDR noted, had done it again. The President did not
plan to attend the interment services at the cathedral on the twenty-
seventh, but they were evidently on his mind, for late in the evening
on the twenty-sixth, seated in his study on the second floor of the
White House, he had settled down with a pencil and a pad and had
written out detailed instructions for his funeral and burial.

No member of his family or his staff saw this document before his
sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia,
on April 12, 1945. Sealed in an envelope addressed to his eldest son,
James, it had been placed in a safe in the President's bedroom and was
not opened until several days after he was buried. Yet Franklin Roose
velt's feelings about his home at Hyde Park (and about the overeager
Bishop of Washington) had become so well known to them that most
of his wishes were carried out.

And so, at eight-fifty on the morning of Sunday, April 15, Franklin
Roosevelt's train from Washington slid to a stop for the last time at the
siding his father, James Roosevelt, had built long before, at the foot of
his estate on the eastern shore of the Hudson River. There were
seventeen Pullmans. The President's body had ridden alone in the last
car, guarded through the night by just four servicemen Army, Navy,
Marine, and Coast Guard. Three of his own sons were away at war,
but the rest of his immediate family was aboard the train; so were many
of his friends and closest aides, members of his Cabinet, and the justices
of the Supreme Court, as well as eighteen of the reporters who had
covered him for so many years. The new President, Harry Truman,

2, Bishop Freeman was nothing if not persistent. According to the President's son James,
the bishop asked to see Roosevelt alone at the White House not long after their encounter at the
cathedral. FDR reluctantly agreed; he was too good a churchman to refuse to see his bishop, But
just moments after the priest wa*s ushered into the Oval Office, a buzzer sounded at the desk of
the President's appointments secretary, Marvin Mclntyre, the signal that Roosevelt wished the
conversation interrupted, When the startled bishop had left, FDR ordered, "If that man ever asks
to see me again, don't let him in!" The President's personal reaction to Freeman's death in 1943
is not recorded. The bishop was buried, of course, in the cathedral crypt.

Source: James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, FDR, p. 103.

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

with his wife and daughter, occupied the armor-plated presidential car,
the Ferdinand Magellan, for the first time.

Few passengers had slept. A good deal of liquor had been poured
during the long night. The great weight of the train had broken three
couplings along the way and caused an hour's delay.

The slow trip north from Georgia through the warm southern
spring had reminded some aboard of another train bearing another
President home in another springtime, just eighty years before. FDR
had been fond of trains since as a boy he had first eagerly watched the
American countryside click past from the window of his father's pri
vate car; in fact, the southern tracks over which his funeral train had
moved toward Washington had once been in his father's charge.
Wherever he went as President, country people in twos and threes and
tens had turned out to watch him pass, silent respectful knots of miners
or fishermen or farmers. This time, they had come by the hundreds,
even at night, standing at crossings and along the country roads to see
the darkened train roll past, their eyes fixed on the brightly lit final car.

The crowds grew bigger in the towns and cities. At Charlotte,
North Carolina, late on the night of the thirteenth, thousands of peo
ple, black and white, stood along the platform and stretched for several
blocks on either side of the station. The train stopped, and a troop of
Boy Scouts began to sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The rest of
the crowd joined in. "It started ragged at first, but then it swelled," a
reporter remembered. "Soon eight or ten thousand voices were sing
ing like an organ. Those people were scared to death. They weren't
singing for a single departed soul. They were singing for themselves,
to hold themselves up." FDR had been President for so long, more
than a dozen years, four years longer than any other man. The younger
people in that crowd could not remember an America without him,
and the radio had made him a familiar presence even in those living
rooms where he had not always been welcome. Many could not even
recall Harry Truman's name; still more had no idea what he looked
like.

As the old hymn ended, the blacks in the crowd, most of whom
had stood apart at one end of the platform, knelt together and began
to sing a hymn of their own. Some whites sang with them as the train
slowly began to move. "Most of the blacks never got to vote for FDR,"
another reporter noted, "but they came out late at night to pray for
him."

FDR's distant cousin, the journalist Joseph Alsop, believed the

Prologue: The River Road 5

President's most lasting legacy had been his inclusion of the excluded.
Until 1933, and despite their great and growing numbers, minority
citizens Catholics, blacks, Jews, and all the rest were routinely ex
cluded from government by the well-to-do white Anglo-Saxon Protes
tants who had jealously guarded their power since the Constitutional
Convention. FDR, who was himself by birth and upbringing, educa
tion and expectation, a member of that ruling class, had been shrewd
and self-confident enough to alter its ancient policy and welcome able
men (and women) of every background to Washington, to make even
the most rejected feel that they were somehow important to the Ameri
can commonwealth.

In the process, he had made bitter enemies of the wealthy Protes
tants among whom he had lived most of his life. He had raised their
taxes, regulated their business practices, threatened their dominance;
he was, they said, a hypocrite, untrustworthy, demagogic, a "traitor to
his class," and many of them, hating his name too much even to utter
it, simply called him "That Man in the White House/ 73

To most Americans, though, he had seemed more savior than
traitor. On March 4, 1933, the first of FDR's four inauguration days,
the United States had been a haunted, frightened place, in the fourth
year of a depression which had put one out of four wage earners out
of work. Earlier that long cold winter, former President Calvin Coo-
lidge, who had presided over the boom days of the 1920s that already
seemed unimaginably distant, expressed something of the general de
spair. "In other periods of depression/' he said, "it has always been
possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you
could base hope, but as I look about me I see nothing to give ground
for hope nothing of man/'

Such talk was alien to Franklin Roosevelt's whole being. "This
Nation asks for action, and action now/ 7 he said in his first inaugural
address. "We must act quickly." He acted, and he continued to act. No
President since Abraham Lincoln had come into office at a more
critical moment. No President since Lincoln had been granted such
powers to work his will. And no President, including Lincoln, did

3, Kven FDR's death did not always diminish his enemies' hatred for him. Many years later,
a man who had been a small boy in 1945, the son of an automobile executive living in the glossy
Detroit suburb of Bloomfieid Hills, recalled watching through the kitchen window one night
that spring as his normally sedate mother and father and their nearest neighbors held hands and
danced around a bonfire in the garden. I lis memory of that sight blurred over time, and he always
assumed that his parents had been celebrating the end of the war in the Pacific that finally came
late that summer, One day he asked his mother about it, "Oh, no, dear," she said. "We danced
because Roosevelt was dead," (Confidential source.)

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

more to alter the old relationship between ordinary citizens and their
government. Before FDR there was no unemployment compensation
or Social Security; no regulation of the stock market; no federal gua
rantees of bank deposits or the right to bargain; no minimum wage or
maximum hours; no price supports for farmers or federal funds for
electric power with which to light their homes; no federal commitment
to equal opportunity or high employment. Not all that had been done
during his presidency had originated with him. Nor had all of it
worked, but when it had not, he had often been willing to change his
mind. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," he once said.
"If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try some
thing." By the time of his death the government he had rebuilt had
accepted responsibility for the welfare of those Americans who found
themselves, through no fault of their own, in economic or social dis
tress.

"The so-called New Deal," Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, "was
. . . nothing more than an effort to preserve our economic system." It
had done that and more, but her husband's greatest achievement, she
believed, was that he had been able to communicate his own assurance
to others. He had restored the "people's sense of security and confi
dence in themselves," she said, without which no recovery would ever
have been possible; and shortly after he died she told one of his closest
aides that when the time came to place a headstone above his grave,
she hoped it would be carved with the best-remembered words from
his first inaugural address: ". , . the only thing we have to fear is fear
itself." 4

It was that will and spirit that the people remembered as they came
out in the dark to see his funeral train pass by.

Now, at the end of the journey, the Roosevelts and Trumans
waited on the train with the President's body while the rest of the party
stepped down, bundled in coats and hats. It had been unseasonably hot
in Washington the day before, and at the ceremony in the East Room
the humid air was thick and sweet with the smell of the banked flowers
behind the coffin. To keep from fainting, Margaret Truman had con
centrated all her attention on the drop of perspiration that seemed to
hang perpetually from the nose of the presiding clergyman.

Here on the Hudson it was barely spring. The morning sun was
brilliant, but the branches of the trees were still bare, and a chill wind

4, This was not done. FDR had asked that only his and his wife's dates of birth and death
appear on the simple stone.

Prologue: The River Road 7

blew in from the west, ruffling the surface of the water. A fleet of cars
drove the mourners up through deep woods to the rose garden on the
bluff above. Roosevelt had always called the winding gravel path they
followed "the river road"; it, too, had been built by his father.

Earlier that morning, a second train of twelve cars carrying a large
delegation from Congress had moved slowly past the first and con
tinued north along the river to the Hyde Park village station. A small
silent crowd of townspeople, Roosevelt's neighbors, waited in front of
the little red brick depot whose eaves were hung with purple and black
crape. Arms folded, they watched as the dignitaries from Washington
talked together in clusters next to the steaming train, their breath
coming in clouds, waiting for the Army staff sedans that were to ferry
them to join the other guests assembling in the garden three miles
away. Several of the men carried briefcases, the onlookers noticed;
even this day, the business of government went on. At the back of the
train, men unloaded armfuls of the flowers that had filled the East
Room. The wind off the river tore at the blossoms and scattered petals
along the track. The flowers filled two railroad cars, and they, too,
were to be taken to the garden.

There, the evening before, men from the Roosevelt estate had dug
the grave. William Plog, the bent gray-haired superintendent of the
family acres who had been hired half a century earlier by Roosevelt's
father, had supervised the work, A Poughkeepsie undertaker had off
ered to send in a crew to do the job. That wouldn't be necessary, Plog
had told him. "I think the President would want his own men to do
that, and we shall do it."

The grave stood empty now, black and shocking against the soft
spring green of the grass, and as the mourners began streaming into
the garden through openings in the south side of the hedge, Plog was
still at work, directing state troopers as they heaped flowers behind the
open grave. Three hundred uniformed servicemen lined the inside of
the ten-foot hedge on three sides the west was open to the river
and Robert Sherwood, the playwright and presidential speech writer,
who was among the first to arrive, noticed that the medals and decora
tions they wore recalled the trials of the great war that Roosevelt had
directed and whose end he had not lived to see North Africa and
Monte Cassino, Guadalcanal and Midway, Tarawa and Normandy.

It is given to few leaders adequately to meet one national crisis.
Franklin Roosevelt mastered two. When FDR had come to office,
America counted for little overseas; General Douglas MacArthur, then

8 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

chief of staff, had ranked her army sixteenth in the world, behind those
of Romania and Spain. When Roosevelt died, the United States and
her allies were only weeks away from victory over the Axis powers,
and America was the most powerful nation in history. Many factors
contributed to that transformation, but none were more important
than FDR's refusal to be intimidated by tyrants, his early sense that
traditional American isolation would not work in the modern world,
and his undiminished conviction that he and his country would pre
vail, whatever the odds. Because he was able to impart that confidence
intact to his fellow citizens, Eleanor Roosevelt said, he "enabled us to
produce as we did in the early days of the war and to go into the most
terrible war in our history and win it."

Nor did illness or exhaustion ever dim his optimism. The final
words of the speech he had intended to deliver on Jefferson Day
restated the theme that suffused his whole presidency: "The only limit
to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move
forward with strong and active faith,"

Doves could be heard in the trees and sparrows fluttered in and out
of the hedge as the crowd of mourners grew; and as the guests waited
for the final ceremony to begin, the men and women murmured to one
another. Not everyone in the garden had admired Roosevelt; there had
been an unseemly jostling to be here, even among congressmen who
had opposed him. And there were others there who had been with him
once and had fallen away. But most had remained his allies, They had
fought alongside him, believed in him, worn themselves out in his
service.

Still, no one waiting in that garden could claim really to have
known Franklin Roosevelt. His big easy smile, his warmth, his obvious
and unfeigned love of company and conversation and a good time, all
had made him seem to outsiders the most accessible of men. He had
called the people all the people "my friends/" But the longer one
knew him, and there were present men and women who had known
him since he was born in the house that stood just yards away, the more
evident it became that there were sides to him that he permitted no one
to see.

Sherwood, who had studied him up close with a dramatist's shrewd
eye for character, confessed that he had never been able to penetrate
the President's "thickly forested interior." Roosevelt's personality was
so mercurial, so filled with paradox, that he called it "multiplex." FDR
was a conservative by training and instinct but utterly unafraid of

Prologue: The River Road 9

experimentation; at once principled and pragmatic; unable to walk
unaided and boundlessly optimistic.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury and
Dutchess County neighbor since 1915, stood now near the grave try
ing to comfort his sobbing daughter Joan. He admitted that his old
friend was "extraordinarily difficult to describe."

"Never let your left hand know what your right is doing/ 7 FDR
had once said to him.

"Which hand am I, Mr. President?" Morgenthau asked.

"My right hand, but I keep my left hand under the table."

Frances Perkins, clutching her purse and wearing one of her famil
iar black hats, had known FDR even longer since he first campaigned
for a seat in the New York State Senate in 1910; she simply thought
him "the most complicated human being I have ever known."

Even Eleanor Roosevelt, now preparing to leave the train and
accompany her husband's body to the top of the hill, knew that she had
never fully shared his inner life. No one had. "He had no real confi
dantes," she once said. "I don't think I was ever his confidante, either."

At a signal, eight uniformed pallbearers carried the casket from the
train to a waiting hearse. High above them, artillery men began firing
a twenty-one-gun salute, crash following crash every fifteen seconds,
echoing and re-echoing across the Hudson.

A flight of twelve silver bombers drummed southward overhead.

As the hearse began moving up the road, several limousines fell in
line behind. These bore the Trumans and the Roosevelts: the Presi
dent's widow; his daughter, Anna, and her husband, Colonel John
Boettiger; the second youngest Roosevelt son, Elliott (now a brigadier
general), and his wife, the actress Faye Emerson; and the wives of his
absent sons James, Franklin, Jr., and John.

The limousines moved slowly up the road along which FDR had
loved to speed, spinning around the bends in his open hand-controlled
Ford, and leaving the Secret Service behind. Fallen logs, green with
moss, lay across one another on the forest floor* Violets had begun to
bloom among the logs and along the road, and here and there were the
green and yellow spears of daffodils. Behind the cortege, the river was
hidden now by the branches of giant poplars. Roosevelt had believed
this stand of trees to be virgin forest, untouched since before Henry
Hudson's day, and this largely fancied link with primeval America had
been important to him; he had loved to show it to visitors.

Roosevelt was nearly home. The hearse glided past the ice pond

10 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

where he had sometimes swum as a boy and where he had helped teach
some of his children how to swim, and on up to the edge of the broad,
sharply sloping meadow below his house, down which he had sledded
every winter of his boyhood.

Here, where the path emerged from the woods, a gun carriage
waited, drawn by six brown horses. Lines of servicemen 883 in all
stood along both sides of the road ahead. The casket, covered with
a flag and somehow surprisingly small to contain a President the
President to a generation that liad known no other was lifted from
the hearse and strapped tight to the carriage; the climb ahead was steep.

A seventh horse, riderless, walked behind, its head and body
hooded, stirrups reversed; boots and a sword hung upside down from
the left stirrup, traditional symbols of the fallen warrior. Ahead
marched the U.S. Military Academy band. There was no music at first;
the men needed their breath for climbing. But the cadence of its
muffled drums could be heard now in the garden, growing closer, and
so could the distant pealing of the bell of St. James.

At the head of the procession, in front of the bandsmen, came a
battalion of honor, 600 West Point cadets, grave and wide-eyed in their
gray uniforms, moving in perfect unison, A reporter noted that "not
a crease of a bending knee [was] a quarter of an inch out of line." But
at least one cadet had trouble controlling his emotions. u l felt a tear
trickle down my cheek," he would confess to his parents; Roosevelt
had been u my ideal in life, perhaps the greatest man the world has ever
seen."

The procession halted just outside the hedge. The band played
Chopin's funeral march while the cadets passed into the garden from
the river side, one column after another swinging to a halt until the
battalion formed a solid phalanx. Then it played "Nearer My God to
Thee" as the two presidential families entered the garden and took
their places near the grave. Mrs. Roosevelt was dry-eyed but haggard
beneath her veil. On her black dress was a gold pin with the three
feathers of the Roosevelt family crest worked out on it in diamondvS.
Her husband had given it to her on their wedding day forty years
before.

To the east stood congressmen and Cabinet members; the military
chiefs of staff and the members of the Supreme Court were to the west.
Behind the wall of flowers to the north were friends and neighbors
from Hyde Park.

Three elderly members of the President's family were too frail to
stand while they waited. Uncle Fred Delano and Mrs. Price Collier,

Prologue: The River Road 11

his late mother's surviving brother and sister, had come on the train
from Washington; they had wanted to "ride home with Franklin,"
Mrs. Collier said. Betty Roosevelt, the second wife and widow of the
President's half brother James Roosevelt Roosevelt, had been driven
over from her home next door. Bundled in black, all three sat on
massive chairs in the bright sunshine.

They struggled to their feet as a youthful crucifer passed through
the leafy gateway, followed by the Reverend George Anthony, the
aged rector of St. James, gaunt in his black velvet skullcap and cassock
and white surplice. Behind him, pallbearers carried the coffin to the
grave.

A lone bomber, unscheduled, flew over the garden, dipping its
wings in salute.

Then there was only the sound of birds as the rector removed his
cap, his white surplice blowing in the wind. His voice was strong and
sure as he asked Christ's mercy on His departed servant, intoned the
Lord's Prayer, and finally recited the first stanza of John Lodge Eller-
ton's elegy:

"Now the laborer^ task is o'er;
Now the battle day is past;
Now upon the farther shore
Lands the voyager at last.
Father in thy gracious keeping
Leave we now thy servant sleeping. "

The silence that followed was so complete that everyone in the
garden could hear the squeaking of the leather straps that held the
coffin as it was lowered into the earth*

West Point riflemen fired three volleys into the brilliant sky. The
President's cousin Margaret Suckley held his Scottie on a leash; at the
first volley, Fala began howling, rolling over and over in the grass.

A small child began to cry and was rushed away by its embarrassed
father,

A West Point cornetist blew taps.

The family left the graveside; the other mourners followed them.

Franklin Roosevelt was left alone in his mother's garden at Hyde
Park, just as he had wished.

The broad, slow-moving river and the big shabby comfortable
house that overlooked it had been the great constants in his life. Al
ways, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he had come back

12 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

here to restore himself as student, candidate, bureaucrat, business
man, invalid, governor, and perhaps two hundred times in his dozen
years as President*

If there was an answer to the riddle of his personality, a way
through that forested interior, surely it would be found in this place,
among these people.

CHAPTER

1

MR. JAMES

Spring had come late to the Hudson Valley in 1867, too; and when
James Roosevelt and his wife, Rebecca, drove up the long driveway to
their new home on April 30 of that year, mist hid the hills beyond, and
a cold, steady rain slanted down, driven by the wind off the river. The
carriage splashed along the edge of a stubbled, muddy field beneath big
trees, their bare limbs black and shiny with rain, and stopped in front
of the house.

Dark and clapboarded, it was not large as Hudson River manors
went there were just seventeen rooms and it was in poor repair. A
three-storied tower stood at the southeast corner, and a deep veranda
ran the full length of the front and around one side, its pillars thickly
wound with ivy. The house's profile reminded James of a locomotive
with a tall smokestack pulling a train of cars. Water dripped steadily
from the overhanging eaves as the Roosevelts hurried inside.

They were a handsome couple. Rebecca, then thirty-six, was a
merry woman, plump and attractive, and capable of putting almost
anyone at ease. Her husband was more reserved; his servants, the
townspeople, even some of his friends, found it most comfortable to
call him "Mr. James." He was slender and erect, of medium height,
with alert hazel eyes, a firm chin, and brown muttonchop whiskers just
beginning to go gray at thirty-nine.

The Roosevelts had been happily married now for fourteen years
and had one child, an amiable thirteen-year-old boy named James

14 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Roosevelt Roosevelt, whom everyone including his parents called
u Rosy." At the moment he was staying with his uncle, John Aspinwall
Roosevelt, at his home just two miles down the Albany Post Road, but
soon he would be coming to live in the new house as well.

Like many of their friends, the Roosevelts led a serene but peripa
tetic life, dividing the year between their country home on the Hud
son, a house in New York City in which they spent the harshest winter
months, and long vacations abroad.

They had been at Interlaken in the Swiss Alps in September of
1865, when word came that their old house in tlie country, Mount
Hope, had been burned to the ground. James Roosevelt's grandfather
had built Mount Hope; James himself had been born there, and he had
inherited it at his grandfather's death. Its loss had seemed "a fearful
dream," he wrote; he could not believe that his "dear old home is
among the things of the past/ 7 Rather than rebuild, James had sold the
land to the State of New York for $45,000 it became the site of the
Hudson River State Hospital, a mental institution and began looking
for a place of his own to buy with the proceeds.

The house whose gloomy, vacant interior he and Rebecca were
now exploring had not been their first choice. They had hoped to buy
Ferncliffe, the far more opulent Hudson River estate of John Jacob
Astor III at Rhinebeck. James Roosevelt was himself a wealthy man
general manager of the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad,
director of the Consolidated Coal Company of Maryland, responsible
custodian of a considerable inheritance but his fortune was inconse
quential compared to that compiled by Astor's grandfather, and it had
taken him three days to get up the nerve to call and make an offer for
his house. He paced outside Astor's door for half an hour one morning,
unable to bring himself to knock, and finally left, wandering the streets
the rest of the day until a nervous headache drove him home. Rebecca
spoke firmly to him, and two days later he managed to make it past
the door. He offered $40,000. Astor turned him down; it was $50,000
or nothing.

The Roosevelts lowered their sights. They tried next to buy a more
modest place on the river from Moses Beach, another New York
businessman, only to find him unable to decide whether or not he
really wanted to sell. (Rebecca was secretly relieved; she thought the
Beach place "perfectly hopeless, on account of a villa he had built
which would not do for a carriage house,")

The Hyde Park house the Roosevelts finally settled upon was built

Mr. James 15

in 1826, and had been owned by a railroad executive named Josiah
Wheeler. Not only was the house run-down, but Wheeler, whose
heart had never been in farming, had neglected the fields and gardens,
and all the outbuildings needed attention.

Still, Rebecca wrote, they were "quite satisfied with our purchase."
There was a lot of work to do. But the house could fairly easily be put
in good order. An enclosed garden filled with rosebushes and plum and
pear trees stood just to the north, its tall hedges already almost half a
century old. With the house and garden came 110 acres of land on
which James could raise his trotting horses. (Later, he would buy up
adjacent tracts until his estate encompassed almost 1,000 acres of fields
and forests.) And even through the drizzle the view of the river from
the veranda was majestic.

James threw himself into the work. Rebecca marveled at his en
ergy. The first few weeks in their new home she hardly saw him
between breakfast and supper as he strode from task to task, seeing that
oilcloth and Brussels carpet were properly laid, checking to make sure
the painters used the right shade of green on the piazza, supervising
the installation of indoor plumbing in the house. Rebecca called him
"Boss Plumber" for a time. He took charge of the land, too, riding over
it daily with Rosy at his side, inspecting fences, seeing that his horses
and his herd of Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney cattle were well pas
tured, showing the gardener where Rebecca wanted her new plants set
out. The gardener's name was Sebastian Bauman, but Mr. James ad
dressed him and all the other men and women who worked on the
place by their first names; so did Rebecca and Rosy.

One day James and Rosy called Rebecca out from the house to see
a trembling newborn Alderney calf they had found in the woods.
Sebastian had carried it home in his arms. Precisely one year later they
found another one on the same spot.

Each morning, Rebecca wrote, she and James walked together in
the enclosed garden, gathering "thousands of roses before breakfast."
And when it grew too hot to do much during the day, James went on
working at night. After supper one evening in June, Rebecca walked
with him through the woods to the ice pond a quarter of the way down
the bluff and sat beneath a tree while he raked leaves from its silver
surface by the light of a young moon.

The fire that had razed Mount Hope had also taken with it all but
a few of the family's possessions. "Our loss is total," Rebecca had
confided to her journal in Switzerland. "Nothing left but three lamps

16 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

and a little bedding." And when her mother-in-law sent her a charred
book from the old library as a memento, she had wept.

Actually, it had not been quite that bad. A rosewood bed and
bureau had been rescued, along with two small Duncan Phyfe chairs.
So had a large silver tea service that had belonged to James's great
grandfather. And at either end of the table in their new dining room,
James and Rebecca carefully placed a chair from the old house. Carved
deeply into the back of each were the roses and plumes of the Roosevelt
family crest.

Later, when he had his estate more or less the way he wanted it,
James ordered his men to dig up the tall brownstone gateposts that had
marked the entrance to his grandfather's house, haul them up the road
by oxcart, and reinstall them on either side of the driveway to his own.

Continuity was important to him. He was very proud to be a
Roosevelt.

The Roosevelts were an old New York family, but they came
relatively late to the Hudson Valley. By the time Franklin Roosevelt's
great-grandfather built Mount Hope in 1818, more wealthy and pow
erful clans such as the Livingstons, the Schuylers, the Verplancks, and
the Van Rensselaers had already been living along the river for two
centuries. In that anachronistic, almost feudal world, the Roosevelts
were always parvenus.

They were descended from Claes Van Rosenvelt, a hardy Dutch
man about whom little is known except that he was married to an
Englishwoman named Thomas, came to New Amsterdam about 1650,
and carved out for himself a comfortable farm on what is now the far
eastern fringe of the garment district. Claes had a son named Nichols,
who in turn had three sons: one of these, Johannes, was the ancestor
of Theodore Roosevelt; the line established by another son, Jacobus,
would lead eventually to FDR.

The descendants of Jacobus James in English Roosevelt were
able, energetic, and prosperous, noteworthy among the leaders of New
York's Knickerbocker society only if unbroken solvency and good
manners are thought exceptional. Their wealth came from Manhattan
real estate, dry goods, and the West Indian sugar trade. And they had
married well, linking their clan with the sons and daughters of other
important families, both English and Dutch. In this way, Franklin
Roosevelt would write, "the stock kept virile and abreast of the times."

One eighteenth-century Roosevelt stood out above the rest.

Mr, James 17

Remembered in the family as "the patriot," Isaac Roosevelt was a
sugar merchant whose indignation at the way British trade laws cut
into his profits, rather than any abstract concern with the rights of
man, drove him to join the Revolutionary cause. (It was his elegant
English tea service that had been salvaged from the ruins of Mount
Hope.) He was a moderating influence among his fellow business
men before the fighting began, determined to help win repeal of il
licit taxes but hopeful always that there would be a reconciliation
between king and colonies, and adamant against the violence to
property encouraged by the Sons of Liberty. Still, when the crisis
came in the summer of 1776, he voted for independence as a delegate
to the Provincial Congress. It was not an easy decision. Many of his
closest friends were Tories, and when English troops occupied New
York he was forced to abandon his home and business and flee to
Dutchess County for the duration.

Later, he helped fashion the new constitution that created New
York State, doing all he could behind the scenes to limit the spread of
democracy and safeguard the rights of men of property, and he helped
win New York's ratification of the Federal Constitution as a member
of the Constitutional Convention of 1788. During forty days and
nights of sometimes angry debate at Poughkeepsie, he was a solid but
silent member of the Federalist forces led by his friend Alexander
Hamilton, never once taking the floor himself. His alliance with
Hamilton carried over into his business life as well; he served as presi
dent of the Bank of New York, which he, Hamilton, and others had
founded in 1784,

Isaac's son, James, inherited both his father's business and his poli
tics, serving one uneventful year in the State Assembly. It was he who
built Mount Hope on the Hudson, living there or on another farm in
Harlem during the summer months and in a handsome town house at
18 South Street the rest of the year. During his long and largely
tranquil life he had three wives and eleven children. 1

1. The consistent conservatism of his ancestors evidently bothered FDR, Not long before
his death he rather forlornly asked one of his secretaries, Jonathan Daniels, to see if the Library
of Congress couldn't find some sort of link between his great-grandfather, Isaac the Patriot, and
Thomas Jefferson, whom the President found much more congenial than Alexander Hamilton.
The historian David C. Mearns, director of the reference department, did his best but neither
he nor his staff could find any evidence that the two men had ever even met. A note of somewhat
desperate cheer dominates Mearns's reply to Daniels:

There is an interesting item in Jefferson's unpublished account book (for 1790), which reads
u pd, Roosevelt 3 feather fans. 24/." Inasmuch as the New York directory for 1789 lists no
fewer than five mercantile establishments under the name of Roosevelt, and Isaac and his son

18 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Knickerbocker society, in which Isaac and James Roosevelt and
their families were entirely at home, was closed and comfortable, still
centered on Manhattan's tip, and surprisingly small. As late as 1830, a
contemporary wrote, "a New Yorker of no very extended acquaintance
could tell the names of all the principal merchants and where they lived."

Their homes were modest by later standards narrow three- or
four-story houses of brick on cobbled streets only a few steps from
their places of business. Isaac Roosevelt lived on Pearl Street; his sugar
refinery was just behind his house, his bank right across the street.
There were few carriages the city was small enough so that one could
walk almost anywhere and even the most prominent families rarely
dined out in public. Guests were entertained in the parlor or strolled
with their hosts along the Battery. The Sabbath was strictly observed,
the whole family marching to church together three times during the
day, their servants following along behind, one old New Yorker re
called, "as an evidence that the family was doing its whole duty,"

If a strong sense of duty and of decorum united the society of old
New York, so, too, did a century and a half of family alliances. Money
alone provided no entree, "The applicant for admission" to New York
society of that day, wrote a nostalgic member of it long after every
thing had changed, "must possess the requisite affinities and bear the
unmistakable evidences which, the world over, proclaim the gentle
man by sentiment and education. This idea of aristocracy pervaded
Gotham ... it underlay and formed the foundation of New York
society. The good old fathers and their Madames were great sticklers
for form and ceremony; their full ruffles and cuffs were starched, and
unwittingly imparted to the wearer an air of dignified composure that
would check the merest approach to familiarity from their juniors."

The dignified composure of the Roosevelts was especially memora
ble. Many years later, Philip Hone the diarist and former mayor of the
city who as a boy had known Isaac Roosevelt, recalled that he and the
members of his generation had been another "sort of people from those
of the present day. Proud and aristocratical, they were the only nobil
ity we had . . . men could not stand straight in their presence." Others
agreed. The obituary notices of three successive Roosevelt patriarchs

were primarily dealers in sugar, it is impossible to link it to them. . , . Still, it is clear that
when in New York, Thomas Jefferson obtained his feather fans from the Roosevelt family!

Source: Mearns to Daniels, April 9, 1945, Jonathan Daniels Papers, Franklin I). Roosevelt
Library (hereafter designated FDRL).

Mr. fames 19

use the identical phrase to describe the departed: Each had been u a
gentleman of the old school."

And it is likely that they shared their friends' horror at the changes
that were then disturbing the tranquillity of their little port city. Hun
dreds of immigrants disembarked at the Battery Park Wharf each day;
their strange accents could be heard in every street. New York's out
skirts edged steadily up the island of Manhattan to accommodate them,
and the old families themselves eventually found themselves forced to
follow suit. "The old down town burgomasters/ 7 wrote Philip Hone,
"were marching reluctantly north to pitch their tents in places which
in their time were orchards, cornfields or morasses, a pretty smart
distance from town." James Roosevelt joined that genteel exodus in
1821, moving to a new house at 64 Bleecker Street in Greenwich
Village, in the hope that his family would benefit from its more whole
some small-town atmosphere.

But more than the Knickerbocker neighborhoods was threatened.
The political power the old New York families had once wielded so
freely was also slipping away. Governing had been one thing; it was
a gentleman's duty to help guide the destinies of persons less fortunate
and less well informed than he, just as it was incumbent upon him to
contribute to charity. Both Isaac and James Roosevelt were proud of
having held public office. But electoral politics was quite another mat
ter. Competing for votes was thought unseemly, unprincipled, vulgar.
The Federalist Party having disintegrated, the Roosevelts of Jacobus'
line became Whigs, but they no longer even considered an active part
in political life.

In this they mirrored the attitudes of their friends and neighbors.
The revulsion and fear the old families felt for the new and sweaty
world of partisan politics was deep and long-lasting. Francis Grund,
an Austrian nobleman who admired American democracy, was aston
ished by the enmity wealthy New Yorkers felt toward ordinary citi
zens during his visits to New York in the 1830s. It was as if the
aristocrats thought "themselves beset by dogs," he wrote, "and are
continually kicking for fear of being bitten."

Among the wealthy men and women with whom Grund spoke,
politics was thought "wholly uninteresting except to tavern-keepers
on election days ... a subject unworthy of the pursuit of gentlemen,
and a thing banished from people of fashion and good taste. . . . Thus
a 'popular candidate for office' is equivalent to 'a vagabond who has

20 BEFORETHETRUMPET

no business of his own'; 'popularity' means 'the approbation of the
mob.' " Grand added that "all these significations apply only to mem
bers of the democratic party ... for it is easily understood why a man
of property should be attached to his country; but the poor man has
no right to be so, and is therefore justly suspected whenever he takes
an interest in politics."

An elderly and oblivious woman of the sort who might well have
visited the Roosevelt parlor confided to Grund that she had no objec
tion to liberty in the abstract. U I think all men, with the exception of
our negroes, ought to be free; but I cannot bear the ridiculous notion
of equality which seems to have taken hold of our people," If not
crushed soon, she continued, it would be "the ruin of our country,"

The clamorous, noisome new city did not suit James Roosevelt's
oldest son, Isaac, who was born in 1790. He was an unlikely member
of his clan, lacking utterly the family's traditional self-assurance. While
other Roosevelts delighted in the world, Isaac shrank from it. Educated
at Princeton and then at the New York College of Physicians and
Surgeons, from which he was graduated in 1812, he astonished his
parents by announcing that he did not plan to practice medicine. The
sight of blood was unbearable to him, he said; he could not tolerate the
sounds of suffering. He lived with his parents in New York for a time,
collecting books on the history of medicine and venturing out only to
ride north into the countryside to conduct botanical experiments with
his mentor, Dr. David Hosack, whose twenty-acre Elgin Botanical
Garden then covered the land now occupied by Rockefeller Center. 2

When Mount Hope was completed in 1820, he moved there, con-

2. Dr. Hosack eventually became Dr. Isaac Roosevelt's neighbor as well as his teacher. He
was an extraordinary man physician, botanist, educator, historian, biographer, public citizen,
In 1828, he purchased a modest house and a large rolling riverfront tract just a few miles north
of Mount Hope, at Hyde Park. Here he hoped to retire and indulge his many interests, I le added
two wings to the house, one in which his grandchildren could play chess and whist and offer
musicales, the other for his collection of some 5,000 books, Six hundred English vSheep kept the
lawns clipped, and a herd of dairy cattle, also imported from the British Isles, was pastured on
his land. The gardens, designed by a French landscape architect, were filled with exotic plants
which envious townspeople sometimes spirited away. Dr. Hosack patrolled the village regularly
in his carriage, spotting the stolen goods in other people's plots and politely asking for them back.
His guests, who included Washington Irving and FYances Trollope, dined on the guavas, citron
melons, and pineapples that flourished in his locked greenhouses. Mrs, Trollope, who found few
things to admire in America, thought Hosack's estate "magnificent ... it is hardly possible to
imagine anything more beautiful,"

Dr. Hosack died in 1835. His house burned to the ground ten years later. In 1898, Frederick
H. Vanderbilt would build on the site a vast and showy Renaissance palace of fifty-five rooms,
each furnished with truly awesome vulgarity.

Source: Christine Chapman Robbins, David Hosack, Citizen of New York, Philadelphia, 1964,
pages 176-190.

Mr. James 21

tinuing his solitary studies and breeding cattle and horses. His brother-
in-law once described Dr. Isaac as "of a delicate constitution and
refined tastes." He was being charitable. In fact, Dr. Isaac was a hypo
chondriac, frightened of people, and paralyzed with dread. One's only
duty in this life, he constantly reiterated, was to be prepared for the
next: "We know not what a day may bring forth. 'Be ye also ready'
is the warning voice." He seemed destined to remain an eccentric
recluse to the end, a mild embarrassment to his prominent family,
perhaps, but inoffensive if kept in the country.

Then, in 1827, another surprise: Dr. Isaac announced that he
planned to marry his parents' neighbor on Bleecker Street, Mary
Rebecca Aspinwall. She was eighteen; he was thirty-seven.

Once they had recovered from the shock, the elder Roosevelts must
have been pleased. No one knows how the Aspinwalls took the news.
The Roosevelts had been largely content to live on the fortunes their
ancestors had built; the Aspinwalls, with their partners, the Howlands,
were still aggressively amassing theirs. Transportation and shipping
provided the means. They first made good in the whaling business;
later the firm of Howland & Aspinwall became one of the most pros
perous shipping companies in New York, its clippers familiar in the
ports of every continent. Still later, they did well in railroads, and
William Henry Aspinwall, Dr, Isaac's brother-in-law, built himself a
fine mansion on University Place, and another even larger one at
Barrytown, above Rhinebeck on the Hudson.

Little is known of Mary Rebecca Aspinwall other than that she was
a patient and loving wife to her querulous husband, but her mother was
a Howland, and it seems clear that she brought to the marriage a badly
needed dash of the vigor with which her Yankee forebears on both
sides had wrested their wealth from the sea.

For somehow their son, James, the President's father, inherited
more than Dr. Isaac's fears. He grew to be a serious and upright man,
but there lived in him, too, something of the gambler; he would prove
willing, even eager, to take risks. The conservative and the gambler
warred within James Roosevelt all his life, just as they would later war
within his son. And when the time came for him to raise his own boys,
he would work hard to recreate in minute detail the world in which
he himself was raised.

James was born at Mount Hope on July 16, 1828, during the final
year of the presidency of John Quincy Adams, and was baptized that

22 BE FORE THE TRUMPET

winter in the old Dutch Reformed Church at Poughkeepsie. Soon
thereafter, perhaps at the gentle urging of his wife, Dr. Isaac decided
that he should at last have a home of his own. He purchased a large
plot of land just across the Albany Post Road and built on it a big solid
gabled dwelling with deep verandas on all four sides. He named it
Rosedale, and around it he planted trees and shrubs so thickly that the
river could only be glimpsed through the leaves and little light was
allowed to enter the dark paneled rooms; Dr. Isaac discouraged even
the sun from intruding upon his refuge. 3

Here, James spent his first fourteen years. We know few details of
his life at Rosedale the fire that destroyed Mount Hope took with it
most of the family papers but it must have been at least outwardly
tranquil and secure.

There can have been few steady playmates. Tutors taught him his
first lessons. But his mother adored him and his father loved him with
what Dr. Isaac himself called "a love inexpressible, pure and elevat
ing." He had no rival for his parents' affection. Servants saw to his
needs, and he was free to roam his family's lands with his black dog
Billy; he hunted and fished, built a waterwheel on the ice pond, learned
to ride and care for the fine horses his grandfather bred and trained on
the other side of the road.

Still, the purity of his father's devotion was always alloyed by his
fears, his constant warnings of the end that might come at any instant.
These must have been especially frightening to a child because they
had no apparent cause. If one needed to be fearful in the midst of
Rosedale's placid and self-contained universe, no place was safe, noth
ing could be relied upon, the future was always filled with peril.
Perhaps in response, James developed an air of sobriety beyond his
years, at least in the presence of adults. He learned early that many
things were better left unsaid, uncomfortable thoughts best swallowed.
Even when he was a small boy few called him Jim or Jimmy; he was
already James and would soon become Mr. James.

3. The biographer Kenneth S. Davis, visiting Rosedale in 1967, was shown a secret cellar,
cement-walled. The family then living in the house told him that a plumber had uncovered it
while doing some work in 1955, and that "historical research" led them to believe it had been
a hideaway for runaway slaves, and that Dr. Isaac must therefore have been a stationmaster on
the clandestine Underground Railroad that helped spirit fugitives north to Canada. Davis sug
gests quite rightly that Dr, Isaac's "peculiar psychology" especially his near-obsession with
privacy would have made such a dangerous and secret activity perfectly plausible. It might also
help explain the need for the shady screen that he grew around his house. On the other hand,
it seems unlikely that even Dr. Isaac could have kept the presence of runaways secret from his
sons, and impossible to believe that they would have kept their silence if they had learned of it,
once the Civil War had ended. Nor did Dr. Isaac pass on any special sympathy for blacks to his
children.

Mr. fames 23

When he was nine years old, his parents enrolled him at the Pough-
keepsie Collegiate School, established just the year before in a hand
some pseudo-classical building on a summit east of town. From its
white marble colonnade, young James could gaze across fields and
farmhouses to the roofs and steeples of Poughkeepsie, then home to
fewer than 7,000 persons, and to the river and the Catskills far beyond;
if he turned his face northward he could just make out the roof of
Rosedale above its screen of trees, three miles away. Unlike the other
boys, James was a day student; the family carriage came to take him
home each evening and brought him back the next morning.

The Collegiate School was intended for the sons of Hudson River
gentlemen first, and then for boys of good family from as far away as
Cuba, Mexico, and South America. James and his schoolmates, said the
Poughkeepsie Eagle, were all "of the right sort" and enhanced the town
by their attendance. They were led through a rigorous curriculum that
included French and Spanish, Latin and Greek, rhetoric and logic,
mathematics, natural philosophy, and history (especially u that of our
country").

The school's founder, Mr. Charles Bartlett, A.M., was a pioneer in
the gentling of education. His students were never beaten, as they
routinely were at other private academies; rather, allowance was made
for what Bartlett called u the nature of the juvenile mind," and disci
pline was achieved by "disapprobation of the instructors" and "private
and public censure"; "rewards and punishments [were] of an intellec
tual and moral nature, addressed to the understanding of the heart."

James attended Mr. Bartlett's school for five years, but somehow
its leniency did not seem to have the desired effect, or at least Dr. Isaac
did not believe it had. He thought James "unruly." Whether the
normal exuberance of boyhood was simply more than the nervous
doctor could endure, or whether he felt his son was learning bad habits
from his schoolmates, we cannot know. It is possible that James may
really have been rebellious when away from home, for in 1840, when
the boy was twelve (and his father was fifty), a brother, John Aspinwall
Roosevelt, was born at Rosedale. James would not have been the first
only child to feel threatened by a pink and shrieking intruder on what
had been his own exclusive world.

In any case, in the fall of 1841, at the age of thirteen, James Roose
velt was sent away to Mr. Alexander Hyde's school at Lee, Massachu
setts. If Dr. Isaac sought for his son a more pious and tranquil atmo
sphere far removed from worldly temptation, he chose well. For half
a century, Lee had been the religious fiefdom of a singular Congrega-

24 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

tional minister, the Reverend Alvan Hyde, and of his schoolmaster
son, Alexander.

It was a lovely little town at the foot of the Berkshires, peopled by
independent-minded farmers. A good many men of Lee had marched
with Daniel Shays during the farmers' rebellion of 1787, and when the
young Reverend Hyde arrived from Connecticut to apply for the
pastorate of the First Congregational Church in 1 792 there had not
been a permanent pastor for eight years. Several men had come to
town "to preach with a view to settle," but the turbulent congregation
had been unable to agree to hire any of them. One was rejected because
he was thought guilty of "denying eternal punishment"; another be
cause some churchmen did not like his "ideas of all mankind's being
finally happy." A sympathetic parishioner warned Hyde that "we have
been very Shaysy here, and you'll have to be wise as a serpent to keep
peace among us."

Alvan Hyde, though only twenty-two, proved more lion than
serpent. He overwhelmed the parish with his eloquence and zeal. His
revivalist message was simple and terrifying, and there was no room
in it for abstruse doctrinal differences. "His teachings were not over
laid and smothered by imported facts and notions," an admirer wrote.
"Theory that did not lead to practice was a mere tinkling cymbal"
Having heard him preach, the townspeople begged him to stay; they
helped build him a house, offered him a larger salary than his predeces
sor had received, and when that did not suffice, supplemented it with
produce. One member of the congregation brought him a year's sup
ply of honey every autumn.

In return, the Reverend Hyde came very close to taking over their
lives. He mediated town disputes, dominated town politics, supervised
the schools, and so strengthened his congregation with the fierce ur
gency of his preaching fired by rum in the years before the temper
ance enthusiasm caught up with him that a new church had to be
built to contain the newcomers,

A local historian recalled that Hyde had soon "trained up a townful
of theologians. Men, women, and children discussed original sin and
Preordination. " Those who cursed or drank too much knew that he
would learn of it and make awful examples of them on Sunday, when
everyone would be at church and eager to hear the worst. A resident
remembered that " 'I couldn't go a foot' was no excuse when Dr. Hyde
as he was sure to do came during the week to find out the reasons
for non-attendance." Village politics became uniform, too. "All good

Air. James 25

children were born whigs," wrote an old citizen of Lee, u and it took
a good deal of other kinds of goodness to compensate for the sin of
being a democrat . . . To indicate publicly any anxiety for an office
always lessened one's chances; and to electioneer for one's self insured
. . . defeat." That, too, must have comforted Dr. Isaac.

The Reverend Alvan Hyde died in 1833, but his memory and
example gripped his town long after he had left the pulpit; and his son,
Alexander, carried on his interest in education. Educated at Williams
College, Alexander Hyde started a school for gentlemen's sons in
rooms above the meeting house in 1835, and two years later opened
a second school in his own home.

It was here that James Roosevelt came to live and learn. Alexander
Hyde specialized in the pacification of troublesome boys. He put re
lentless emphasis on religion, with special attention to God's wrath
toward the disobedient. Prayer services opened and closed each day.
Sunday was entirely given over to worship: morning devotions, morn
ing services at the church (where James and his fellow scholars were
kept alert by an usher's horn-tipped rattan), Sunday school, afternoon
prayers, and evening worship. The boys were sustained from dawn to
supper on the Sabbath only by large spice cookies, gritty with caraway
seeds and carried in their pockets.

Like Mr. Barrett of the Collegiate School, Alexander Hyde pro
mised a homelike atmosphere "a family school" free of physical
brutality. His patience had its limits, however, and recalcitrant scholars
were likely to have their hair pulled. A middle-aged alumnus returning
for a reunion in the 1870s joked to his old schoolmaster that he had
been the cause of his baldness; Hyde said he had entirely forgotten the
incident, but had no doubt it had been deserved.

Even at Hyde's school, James could not entirely escape the shadow
of his father's fears. Dr. Isaac worried that his son might be reading
the wrong sort of fiction, the kind that was not "well written and moral
or religious," and he despaired even of his absent son's devotion: "I
often wonder if the extent of your love is as great as mine."

And sometimes life seemed to confirm his worst fears. In 1842, he
wrote to his son that all seven of his own brothers were now dead, the
last just drowned in the Hudson and found floating several days later
"so much changed" that he could be identified only by his watch. The
body had been too bloated to fit into a coffin; and "owing to the
condition of the corpse," Dr. Isaac explained, a no person attended the
funeral but myself ... the sexton & 2 assistants." He drew his custom-

26 BE FORE THE TRUMPET

ary conclusion: "How important, my dear son, that we should make
it the great business of our lives to be prepared for another and a better
world . . . Repent . . . Strive to correct your faults ... be gentle and
mild. Obtain the command of your temper."

Whether it was due to the boy's distance from his own anxieties
or the discipline imposed by Dr. Hyde, James's father was at least
momentarily pleased at his son's progress during the fall and winter
of 1842. "Your improvement in learning and knowledge and good
conduct," he told James, "will be such as will reflect credit to teachers
and parents and do honor to the name of Roosevelt." When James
had been home for the holidays, Dr. Isaac told Dr, Hyde, the boy had
been "amiable, disinterested and endeavored to please us in all things."

Not quite in all things, however. There was the matter of college.
James was determined to attend the University of New York in Man
hattan. His family, and especially his father, dreaded the corrupting
influence of life in the city. If James was permitted to come to New
York, his uncle Gardiner G. Howland warned, "he will become a
Dandy & will walk Broadway with his cane," Dr. Isaac did not believe
his son would fall so low as that. "You know you were created for
better things," he wrote. "We live for God." But he much preferred
that James avoid the risk and remain in some "quiet country village."

His son was adamant, however, and after consulting clergymen,
relatives, and Dr. Hyde (who also distrusted the city), Dr. Isaac nerv
ously acquiesced, requiring that James live at home with his grandpar
ents on Bleecker Street, attending the university only during the day,
and that he further promise to resist those temptations which "are
mortifying to the feelings and put [boys'] tempers as well as their
principles to a severe test."

James entered the University of New York as a freshman in the
autumn of 1843, and did well enough at first, finding time to join a
debating society and win a gold medal for his "Readiness in composi
tion and facility in expressing his thoughts." But something did go
wrong. In May, he and three friends were officially admonished for
having caused "disorder" in the mathematics classroom, and in June
he failed to appear for his final examinations in both mathematics and
Latin.

Dr. Isaac sent him upstate the following fall, to Union College in
the old Dutch city of Schenectady. The president of Union, the Rever
end Dr. Eliphalet Nott, was another specialist in the education and
improvement of difficult boys. His reputation for salvaging wayward

Mr. James 27

students expelled from other schools was so widespread that Union
was sometimes called "Botany Bay," after the Australian penal colony
that gave English convicts their second chance. President Nott "rather
gloried in this appellation," wrote one of James's fellow students,
because "it indicated faith in his rare powers of reclamation."

He was a remarkable man, seventy-two years old when James
arrived on campus, and beginning his fifth decade as Union's presi
dent. (He would serve sixty-two years in that post, the longest college
presidency in American history.) He was famous for his oratory and
his inventive genius as well as his educational reforms, holding patents
on some thirty models of coal-burning stoves and an improved boiler
that made steamboat travel less of a gamble. He had also devised the
curious three-wheeled "chariot" in which he rode around the town
greeting new students and their parents.

He had been a prodigy, had read the Bible through at four and
earned his M.A. at Brown in a single year, and was raised by an
admiring but unbending mother. When, at ten, he refused to eat his
morning mush, the bowl was put before him again at lunch and supper;
he gave in and ate it the next morning, he remembered, "ate the mush,
and in addition, the red ants which had been attracted to it by the sugar
in it." His older brother, the Reverend Samuel Nott, had been his
teacher, a Calvinist so strict, Nott wrote, that "in addition to warnings
and admonitions daily, if I was not whipped more than three times a
week, I considered myself for a time peculiarly fortunate." While still
a small boy, Nott had sworn that "If I lived to be a man, I would not
be like other men in the treatment of their children." 4

He was not. Boys were fundamentally good, he believed, in need
only of self-discipline. An alumnus recalled that he "used to say that
many a life that had germs of usefulness in it had been utterly ruined
by unwise harshness and abandonment, when milder and more persua
sive means would have restored and reformed it." Discipline at Union
was "moral and parental," its catalogue promised. "Disgraceful pun
ishments are not inflicted."

Dr. Nott wished to produce virtuous gentlemen, not mere scholars,
men equipped to make their way in a new and increasingly democratic
world. That world needed reforming, he believed, and it was the duty
of a college to provide its graduates with as much practical knowledge

4. Samuel Nott had also been the mentor of the Reverend Alvan Hyde, the stern preacher
of Lee; perhaps that fact had something to do with Dr. Isaac's decision to send James to Dr. Nott
at Union.

28 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

as possible with which to meet that challenge. Academic traditionalists
had been appalled when he introduced a separate scientific course of
studies alongside the classics, and shocked again just a year before
James Roosevelt arrived, when he engaged an instructor in the purely
technical science of engineering.

To his critics, Dr. Nott's sense of the practical seemed somewhat
overdeveloped. He had made his college the most solvent in the coun
try through a series of statewide lotteries, and the lines between
Union's proceeds and his own were sometimes blurred. "The financial
mysteries of the college," wrote Silas Blunt of the class of 1849, "al
ways suggesting the intimate blending of its funds with the private
means of its president . . . occupied several legislative committees
. . . but our cunning 'Old Prexy 7 invariably foiled them." (Nott would
eventually bequeath some $600,000 to his college.)

Schenectady itself was then a "quaint, quiet town," Blunt remem
bered, "with the grass flourishing between the pavement stones in all
the streets." Dr. Nott once confessed privately that he thought it "the
town under the horse's tail." And the Union students, with their top
hats and frock coats and tall white collars, were the targets of a good
deal of hostility from the local boys. One upperclassman, a clergyman's
son who stood more than six feet tall and favored a bottle-green jacket,
was especially conspicuous. He was Chester A. Arthur, a future Presi
dent of the United States, but then best known for the pranks he loved
to lead.

The Union students had fistfights with the townboys (Dr. Nott
himself rode out in his chariot on one occasion, to offer a battle plan).
They stole pies and broke windows in the downtown stores, and they
took part in smoke-outs, massing in a victim's dormitory room and
puffing away on pipes and cigars until he was forced to flee. And they
loved to harass the trainmen on the Utica and Schenectady Railroad
as their trains inched through town on tracks already in such bad repair
that engines were forbidden to move at more than ten miles an hour.
The Union boys would jump onto the train from one side, jump off
on the other, run around the front of the locomotive while the engineer
and fireman pelted them with chunks of firewood, then leap on and
start all over again.

Precisely what role James Roosevelt played in all this we do not
know. Union students lived in two big brick dormitories, in sparsely
furnished rooms with whitewashed walls and dark woodwork into
which two generations of students had already carved their names.

Mr. James 29

(Chet Arthur did so at least twice.) And they were roused from bed
each morning at six-thirty for roll call and prayers by a clanging bell
that hung in the tower of West College Hall and dictated their com
ings and goings for the rest of the day. The boys grew to hate this bell,
and Arthur once led a raiding party that threw it into the Erie Canal.

But James Roosevelt lived apart from his fellow students at Union,
just as he had at the Collegiate School. He was one of only two students
to reside off campus, in rooms rented from a Mr. Hearsey. His isolation
was certainly not a matter of social standing. Among his fellow stu
dents were the sons of New York families every bit as old and distin
guished as his own: Schuyler, Schermerhorn, and Van Wyck. Freder
ick W. Seward, the son of the Whig governor of New York, was a
classmate. Perhaps it was James himself who insisted on the separation,
a way of asserting at least a little of the independence he had hoped
for during his short year in New York. More likely it was Dr. Isaac's
doing, a means of reassuring himself that James would remain aloof
from mischief.

If so, he was mistaken. "I was this morning both grieved and
astonished by the reception of a letter from Dr. Nott, respecting your
membership of a secret society contrary to the laws of the college," Dr.
Isaac wrote to James in the fall of 1846. "I mean the society which
holds its meetings at a tavern. I must request you to dissolve all connec
tion immediately with this society. . . , Remember my dear son your
promise that while at college you would not give your mother or me
the least anxiety on your account."

It was not the secrecy of the society that was against the college
rules. James had joined Delta Phi, the nation's first Greek letter frater
nity, which had been born on the Union campus with Dr. Nott's
blessing. Rather, it was the fact that it met in a tavern that had agitated
the president. He was a celebrated temperance champion, known
throughout the east for his Ten Lectures on the Use of Intoxicating
Liquors, and in his zeal he was given to creative exaggeration. Those
who drank, he warned his boys, risked the fate of a young inebriate
who, he said, had been found "roasted from the crown of his head to
the soles of his feet . . . standing erect in the midst of a widely extended
silver-colored flame, bearing . . . exactly the appearance of the wick of
a burning candle. ... It was purely a case of spontaneous combustion."

Whether or not James ever believed such stories, he knew enough
to say he did, and agreed to reform. Though intemperance was one of
the very few causes for instant dismissal from Union, Dr. Nott evi-

30 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

dently forgave him, for he was permitted to remain and to graduate
with his class in July of 1847, and even to deliver the class oration.

Another conflict with his father followed. James was now deter
mined to go abroad on his own, to make the Grand Tour of the
Continent that was then considered the proper toppingoff of every
young gentleman's education. Dr. Isaac, of course, was against it. He
could not bear to think of his son so far away. Wandering through
Europe would be dangerous. Exotic diseases lurked everywhere.
There were signs of political turmoil.

This time James's mother came to the rescue. Though she was at
the bedside of her dying father in New York in the summer of 1847,
she took the time to write her husband a chastening letter: "I do hope
sincerely you will allow him to go ... and leave him in the hands of
our Heavenly Father. . . . Let us lay aside our own selfish feelings for
the good of our dear child."

Dr. Isaac gave in. It was the greatest adventure of James Roosevelt's
life. He was on his own at last, free to roam wherever he liked without
the hobble of his father's fears. He spent eighteen months abroad, a
time, his step-grandmother wrote, of "exciting scenes and hairs'-
breadth escapes," He traveled through France, England, Germany,
Spain, Italy, and the Holy Land. His father remained fearful through
out. He did not want James to visit the Middle East because of the
malaria "that prevails on the coast of Syria, amid the ruins of dilapi
dated cities," and he was only briefly cheered when he learned that
James had hired a guide to accompany him while traveling through
"solitary plundering and thieving villages in Italy." Every letter from
James brought tears of relief, and a new crop of worries,

His parents planned to join him in England in the spring of 1848,
leaving eight-year-old Johnny with Dr. Hyde of Lee. Then, at the last
possible moment, Dr. Isaac decided not to go. The first signs of the
revolutions that would soon sweep through Europe could already be
seen in France and Italy. The Continent was now "too excited and
turbulent," he explained; travel would be "unpleasant and unsafe for
a lady." The arbitrary suddenness of his decision tried the patience of
the Aspinwalls. His grandmother wrote James that Dr. Isaac had con
sulted no one; his mother, her trunks already packed, was heartbroken.

Dr. Isaac continued to fret, and when he learned that James had left
Italy and reached Munich safely, he was delighted. "Liberty in
Europe," he warned his son, "is far different from the liberty we enjoy
in our country, and I hope you will continue to take no active part in

Mr. James 31

the revolutions which are agitating the Old World.' 7 (On the other
hand, of course, there were worrisome things in Germany. " Abjure the
pipes & beer & theology/' he continued, "& adopt all that you find
praiseworthy in [the German] character.")

The elder Roosevelts finally made it to Europe in the fall of 1848
and apparently spent the winter months with their son before return
ing to Mount Hope for the summer. As soon as they had left, if family
legend is to be believed, James fulfilled his father's deepest fear: He
went south, crossed the Swiss border into northern Italy, and joined
the encamped army of Giuseppe Garibaldi at Rieti, There, he put on
the red shirt and plumed hat of revolution and drilled alongside the
liberator's peasant soldiers. It cannot have been easy duty for a wealthy
young man. There were far more volunteers that spring than there
were rations or arms, and the local blacksmiths had had to be persuaded
to hammer out lances for those who had no guns. Still, James stuck it
out for a month or so before moving on when he saw no immediate
prospect of action. 5

5. Mr. James's luiropean adventures are scantily documented. None of his early letters
written from the Continent survive, and we have only his father's and step-grandmother's letters
to draw upon, plus family legends and Mr. James's passport, its fragile pages filled with blurred
visas and consular stamps. Some scholars cannot bring themselves to believe that so conservative
a man as Mr. James became could ever have been a revolutionary, however briefly. Their case
is inadvertently strengthened by FDR's own version of the story. In October 1941, the President
was presented with a desiccated cigar, alleged once to have belonged to Garibaldi. He was
delighted with this trophy and sent it on to the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park,
along with a memorandum in which he recorded what he remembered being told about his
father's brief but romantic military career:

He [James] became close friends with a mendicant priest spoke only Latin with him and
the two of them proceeded on a walking tour in Italy. They came to Naples, and found the
city besieged by Garibaldi's army. They both enlisted in this army, wore a red shirt for a
month or so, and tiring of it, as there seemed to be little action, went to Garibaldi's tent and
asked if they could receive their discharge. Garibaldi thanked the old priest and my father
and the walking tour was resumed.

The trouble with this tale is that Garibaldi was nowhere near Naples during the time James
Roosevelt was in Europe; his siege of that city did not begin until 1860.

Still, I believe something of the sort must have happened, James Roosevelt was many things,
but he was not a liar, and there seems no reason for him to have invented such a tale about himself,
especially one so utterly lacking in heroism.

The problem, I think, lies not with the basic facts of the story but with FDR's later embellish
ments of it. James did visit Naples (twice) during his Grand Tour, which may account for part
of the confusion. And on his first sojourn in Italy he did have an Italian companion not a priest,
however, but a "courier," or professional guide, named Joseph Salerno. Dr. Isaac's relief that his
son had taken no "active part in the revolution" (my italics) suggests that he was at least
concerned about something of the kind. James may well once have conversed with a mendicant
priest in Latin in Garibaldi's camp, whether or not the cleric had first swapped his cassock for
a red shirt. Finally, Mr. James's passport shows that he did indeed go back into Italy in the spring
of 1 849, when Garibaldi was encamped at Rieti.

32 B E F O R E T H E T R U M P E T

He sailed for home in May and entered Harvard Law School in the
fall. There was family precedent for his decision. His grandfather and
namesake had studied law and been admitted to the New York bar,
though he had never practiced. James received his LL.B. on July 16,

1851, his twenty-third birthday, having so impressed the Harvard
community with his congeniality and character that, two years after
he left Cambridge, the Porcellian, Harvard's most prestigious club,
made him an honorary member.

In the autumn of 1851, James entered the office of a prominent
New York attorney, Benjamin Douglas Silliman. The busy Silliman
firm practiced common, equity, and admiralty law, and included
among its clients a good many of the new corporations then begin
ning to transform the character of American business. Family con
nections may have helped him obtain this prized position. Silliman's
uncle, also named Benjamin, was a professor of chemistry at Yale, a
prominent alumnus of Union College, and a friend of Samuel F. B.
Morse, the artist and inventor of the telegraph, who was, in turn, a
friend of Dr. Isaac. Morse and his wife lived just south of Pough-
keepsie, and they and the elder Roosevelts visited one another's
homes.

In any case, James remained with the firm for two years. He
found the work tedious after his adventuring abroad, though Silli
man himself was a major power among New York Whigs, and the
office routine was sometimes relieved by intimate views of the inside
of American politics. Once, James was sent to Washington to deliver
some papers to Senator Sam Houston of Texas. He called at Hous
ton's hotel to find the great man ill. A row of chairs ran from the
door of the senator's room to the bed where he lay propped against
pillows. An eager caller sat on each chair, and James took his seat at
the end of the line nearest the door, moving up slowly as one by one
the visitors approached the bedside, held a short murmured conversa
tion, and hurried out with their marching orders. According to
FDR, James always remembered "the Senator's splendid head . . .
and his personality and force."

Among the most important clients of the Silliman firm was the
newly organized Consolidated Coal Company of Maryland, and in

1852, less than a year out of law school, young James Roosevelt was
elected to its board of directors. This was not entirely a tribute to his
talents; his uncle William Henry Aspinwall had helped found the
company. James took the work seriously, however, found that he

Mr. fames 33

much preferred it to what he called the "inactive" life of the law, and
left Silliman the following year to devote himself to business. Shortly
thereafter, he expanded his interests to include railroads. This, too, was
a family tradition. Even timorous Dr. Isaac had invested heavily in the
Hudson River line that had finally managed to stretch its tracks as far
north as Poughkeepsie in 1847. Now his son became general manager
of the Cumberland and Pennsylvania. 6

James Roosevelt never became an economic royalist, but it was not
for want of trying. At least three times during his long business career
he tried to corner a major American industry and make himself truly
rich, a rival of the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Rockefellers. He never
quite succeeded, and he may simply have lacked the requisite drive and
ruthlessness to beat out his competitors. Nonetheless, the effort de
lighted him, providing the heady sense of risk and adventure that this
genteel gambler seemed to need.

Having carved out a career more to his liking than the law had
been, he now found himself a wife. On April 27, 1853, he married
Rebecca Brien Howland. Their alliance further tangled the thicket of
Roosevelt genealogy. His paternal grandfather's third wife, with
whom he had lived while attending the University of New York, had
been a Howland; so had his maternal grandmother; and his bride's
father had been the late Gardiner G. Howland, the uncle who had
worried that James might become a Broadway dandy.

After the wedding the couple went to Niagara Falls, already the
mecca for American honeymooners. On their first morning together
as husband and wife they found themselves eating breakfast in the hotel
dining room with twenty-two other newlywed couples, They set up
housekeeping at Mount Hope, and later in the year sailed for England
and the Continent, setting the pattern they would follow regularly
throughout their lives together.

In London they called upon the new American minister, James
Buchanan, who was said to have taken an immediate liking to James.
(Judge James Roosevelt, a distant cousin and prominent New
York Democrat and a friend of Buchanan's, may have had some
thing to do with the minister's hospitality toward the young visitor

6. The completeness of his initial break with the law seems open to question. As late as 1864
he was writing letters to his brother John on the stationery of the firm of [Albert] Mathews and
[Otis] Swann, a Manhattan law firm with offices at 2 Hanover Street.

Source: Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children, FDRL.

34 B E F O R E T H E T R U M P E T

and his bride.) The embassy was temporarily shorthanded, and
Buchanan asked James to serve as his secretary for a few weeks
until a permanent replacement could arrive from America. James
agreed. 7

It was not an easy time for James Buchanan. A former Secretary
of State and Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, he had hoped for
a Cabinet post from President Franklin Pierce and had been bitterly
disappointed at his posting to London. Only his sense of duty had
made him take it. Ocean travel made him violently seasick. He detested
everything about London; its weather, its high rents, its elaborate
society. And his mood was not improved when even his clothes be
came an issue at court. Secretary of State William Marcy had ordered
that American ambassadors were to wear nothing but "the simple
costume of an American citizen" when calling upon foreign dignitar
ies. American ministers to the Court of St. James's had traditionally
worn elaborate costumes, rich with braid and gold embroidery. Bu
chanan first thought he might solve the problem by dressing in the
style of George Washington, but inspection of portraits of the first
President made him abandon that idea. Appearing in a powdered wig
and knee breeches would have made him a permanent laughingstock
back home. Instead, he attended the queen's levee in early 1854 in a
plain black suit, but wearing a dress sword at his side so as to avoid
being confused with the palace servants. Queen Victoria was un
ruffled, but one London newspaper denounced Buchanan for his bold
"puppyism."

What role the Roosevelts played in all this we do not know. Nor
do we know how long they stayed abroad. But when they came home,
Rebecca was pregnant, and on March 27, 1854, she gave birth to a son.
By Roosevelt tradition, he should have been called Isaac, that name and
James having been alternated for four generations. Instead, Mr. James
named him after himself, and, not liking the diminutive "Junior" he
had sometimes been forced to use to distinguish himself from his own
grandfather, he added a redundant middle name, calling the infant

7. FDR told the story of his father's connection with James Buchanan in a letter to the
historian Roy F. Nichols, In it, he seems to imply that his father served as Buchanan's London
secretary while on his Grand Tour, But Buchanan was Secretary of State in Washington while
young James was abroad for the first time; the historian George Bancroft was then minister to
England, and both men's signatures appear on James Roosevelt's passport with their respective
titles. Still, it is hard to see why Mr. James or FDR would have fabricated a link with so
undistinguished a historical figure as Buchanan, and so I have assumed that the two men did at
least meet in London, but in the 1850s, Buchanan served in London from 1853 to 1856.

Source: President's Personal File (hereafter PPF) 3012, FDRL.

Mr. James 35

James Roosevelt Roosevelt. Few who knew the boy ever bothered with
his full name. He was just "Rosy."

He was a cheerful, open-faced child, the center of life at Mount
Hope, precisely as his father had been at Rosedale a quarter of a
century earlier. James Roosevelt now known to nearly everyone
outside the family as Mr. James was at least as devoted a parent as Dr.
Isaac had been. He spent whole days with his son, teaching him to
shoot and fish, implanting in him his own love for horses that would
become something of an obsession in the boy.

Rosy slept in his parents' bedroom every night until he was at
least ten years old, and did not go to school at all. Mr. Abel, his tutor,
came twice a week before breakfast to hear his lessons. His dancing
master came regularly, too, and when a suitable partner could not be
imported for him from a nearby estate, his nurse suggested that the
scullery maid might stand in, a notion James and Rebecca found
hilarious.

Rosy went everywhere with his parents, and in early 1861 they
were in Paris, where he and his father posed together in a photogra
pher's studio. Mr. James sits on a chair gripping a riding crop and
the collar of a small terrier, standing on its hind legs for the camera;
another bigger hunting dog sits at his feet. He wears boots, a
hunter's coat, and a flat broad-brimmed hat. Beneath it, his gaze is
direct, determined. Rosy, barely six, stands beside him wearing a
cloak with a fur collar and trying very hard to match his father's
expression,

Mr. James's determination did not extend to the battlefields of the
Civil War. He was just thirty-two when the fighting began, but he
made no effort to join the struggle, and the law then allowed wealthy
men to hire substitutes to do their fighting for them.

Exactly what James Roosevelt did do during the war remains a
mystery. Franklin Roosevelt alleged that his father had "rendered
distinguished patriotic service" as a member of the Sanitary Commis
sion, organized in 1 861 to provide aid to sick and wounded soldiers and
their families. He may well have done so he was always conscious of
his responsibilities as a wealthy citizen but no one has ever found
written evidence that he did. Nor did Mr. James himself mention such
service in either of the two brief autobiographical sketches he wrote
in his old age. Some have suggested that he might unofficially have
brought his expert knowledge of railroad management to bear on the
problems of Union transport and supply, and his postwar friendship

36 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

with General Herman Haupt, the German-born engineer who served
as chief of the U.S. military railroads, at least suggests that this may
be the most likely story. 8

In any case, when his younger brother threatened to enlist in
1864, James warned that if he did so it would break their mother's
heart, but if John felt honor-bound to join up anyway, he should
attach himself to the staff of General Marsena Patrick, the provost
marshal of the Army of the Potomac, an old family friend. "The
position would be a pleasant one," he promised, "and we would al
ways have the consolation of knowing it would also be of compara
tive sSafety." (John Roosevelt evidently took his advice, for among his
papers is a crumbling scrapbook in which there is a delicately colored
map of Union supply lines, evidently drawn by him, on stationery
headed "Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, Office of the Provost
Marshal General.")

In 1915, Union College published a proud little volume summariz
ing the wartime service of all its alumni, north and south. Hundreds
of Union men had served; sixty had given their lives, two of them from
James Roosevelt's class. His name appears nowhere in its pages. 9

Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., Mr. James's cousin, friend, and almost
exact contemporary, also avoided the fighting. His reasons were per
haps more understandable. He had married a proud Georgian, Martha
Bulloch, who could not bear to have him take up arms against her
family's cause, and he had compensated for it by tireless labor on behalf
of the Allotment Commission he had helped create to secure funds for
the wives and children of the men at the front. Still, his decision not
to enlist ate at his conscience all his life and embarrassment over the
memory of it may have helped inspire his son's sometimes shrill bel
licosity.

There is no evidence that Mr. James ever lost an hour's sleep over
having stayed at home,

The death that Dr. Isaac had daily expected came for him in 1863

8. Mr, James became president of the Southern Railroads Security Company in 1872 and
went south to survey his holdings early in the following year. General Haupt and'his wife went
along in the official party i laupt was then general manager of the Richmond and Danville line,
part of the S.R.S.C. network, Me and Mr. James got along well; their wives did not, Rebecca
finding Mrs. Haupt altogether too German for her tastes,

Source: Rebecca Roosevelt's journal, FDRL.

9, Certainly, Mr. James's loyalty to the Union was never seriously questioned; in fact it seems
to have grown with the years. James Bulloch, the senior Theodore Roosevelt's brother-in-law,
was a Confederate agent in England during the Civil War and was excluded from the amnesty
that followed the fighting, continuing to live in Liverpool Invited once to meet him by the
family, Mr. James politely demurred; he did not dine with traitors.

Mr. fames 37

at the age of seventy-three. James had already inherited Mount Hope
from his grandfather, but he now received the lion's share of his
father's fortune, enlarged over the years by the shrewd investment
counsel of the Aspinwalls. A smaller legacy and Rosedale, where his
mother still lived, went to John.

Two years later, James, Rebecca, and Rosy sailed for Europe,
leaving Mount Hope in the hands of the William Griswolds of New
York. With them went some twenty trunks and carpetbags; the false
bottom of one trunk concealed $500 in gold as a hedge against emer
gency.

Some 30,000 Americans had traveled to Europe each year during
the 1850s. The Civil War temporarily blocked the tourist stream, but
its flow resumed almost the moment the fighting stopped. The morn
ing the Roosevelts stepped onto the crowded deck of the Scotia, May
17, 1865, the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln was just getting under way at Washington, and a ragged but
defiant Confederate army was still at large in Louisiana.

Like most of their friends, the Roosevelts were at once cosmopoli
tan and provincial. They had lived abroad much of the time and knew
Paris and London and the Alps as well as they knew the streets of
lower Manhattan or their estates on the Hudson. They thought the
English worth emulating. An unkind relative once said of Mr. James
that with his side-whiskers and riding crop and Scottish tweeds, he
sought to seem a like Lord Landsdowne [but] he succeeded only in
mimicking Lord Landsdowne's coachman."

But the rest of the Old World was interesting to them only for its
comforts and its culture. The ordinary people among whom they lived
for months at a time the French and Germans, Italians and Swiss and
Spanish were barely worthy of notice. Visitors like the Roosevelts
learned European languages so that they might make sense of the opera
and the theater and give clear directions to the servants.

In fact, they had little need of European friends, for when they
went abroad they took their own world with them. After the Civil
War, a large segment of New York society simply reconstituted itself
overseas each summer. There were always friends and acquaintances
and sometimes kinsmen aboard the ships that took them across the
Atlantic. And once ashore, the Roosevelts and their circle stayed at the
same hotels (with reassuring names such as the Hotel du New York
in Florence, and the Hotel de TOncle Tom at Paris). They dined at

38

B E F O R E THE TRUMPET

the same restaurants, wandered through the same palaces and picture
galleries, attended one another's parties, worshipped together at the
English or American chapels that offered Protestant services in nearly
every city. On a single day at Geneva, Rebecca encountered sepa
rately and entirely unexpectedly four different close friends, two
from New York and two from Poughkeepsie. U I wonder when we
shall cease meeting people," she wrote that night. The next morning
she met two more.

The Scotia was the finest and fastest ship in Cunard's fleet of
sidewheel steamers, and she offered only first-class accommodations.
Her passenger list was routinely published in the New York Times.
Accompanying "James Roosevelt, Lady, and son" on this voyage was
at least one couple who were close friends, Mr. and Mrs. William T.
Blodgett of New York. He had made a fortune in the varnish business,
collected art, and had paid $20,000 for Frederick Church's busy mas
terpiece, u Heart of the Andes." Seventeen years later, the Blodgetts 7
daughter, Nelly, would serve as Franklin Roosevelt's godmother.

The most celebrated of their fellow passengers were Mr. and Mrs.
August Belmont, on their way to Europe for a brief vacation (accom
panied by two servants). Belmont was an Austrian Jew, a banker who
had come to America as the representative of the House of Rothschild
and then struck out spectacularly on his own. His wealth, ambition,
and ability had made him a power in the Democratic Party and bought
him the American ministership to The Hague in 1853. He was also a
well-known sportsman, president of the Jockey Club, and co-founder
(with his friend Leonard Jerome) of the Jerome Park Racetrack, where
he would often encounter Mr. James.

But the Belmonts were best known as leaders of New York society.
Mrs. Belmont was Caroline SHdell Perry, the lovely if somewhat vague
daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry, and they had been married
by an Episcopal minister. With the awkward question of religion
successfully muted, Belmont had set out to make his wife the city's
leading hostess. The dining room in their mansion on lower Fifth
Avenue seated 200 for dinner, served on gold plates by 200 servants
wearing the full Belmont livery maroon jackets with silver buttons
and scarlet piping, black knee breeches, and a family coat of arms
personally designed by the master of the house. There was also a
cavernous ballroom in which precisely one party was given annually,
The other 364 days of the year, noted Edith Wharton, it was kept in
u shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its
chandelier in a bag."

Mr. fames 39

Belmont could be a charming companion when he wanted to be,
and he tried at least to keep his wealth and power in perspective. "I
prefer," he once wrote, "to leave my children instead of the gilded
prospects of a New York merchant prince, the more enviable title of
American citizen." The prospects of his children were not irreparably
tarnished, however, and when Rebecca Roosevelt's younger brother,
Samuel Howland III, married Frederika Belmont in 1876, she brought
with her an enormous dowry; her wedding dress alone cost $30,000.

Captain Charles Marshall, seventy-three and white-bearded, was a
familiar figure on the transatlantic run. He was an immensely wealthy
shipping magnate, a friendly rival of the Howlands and Aspinwalls,
and he had personally commanded ninety-nine crossings before set
tling permanently into office life. It was well that the Roosevelts had
been acquainted with him before the Scotia left the dock, for he was
not easy to get to know. When he died later that same year, even an
admiring obituary writer admitted that the captain had "possessed an
air of sternness about him that was somewhat repulsive to strangers."

Another bearded passenger was better company. He was thirty
years old and, like Belmont, he had been an immigrant; unlike him, he
had arrived in America dirt-poor and was happy at twelve to work as
a bobbin boy in a cotton mill for $1.20 a week. The Times listed him
as "A. Carnagie, Pittsburgh," and he was sailing to England on busi
ness. A cousin claimed to have perfected a process by which a steel
coating could be permanently fused to iron rails. If it worked, and
Carnegie could obtain the American patent on it, he would dominate
the construction of railroads, bridges, and office buildings for decades
to come. (It didn't work, in fact. Tested the next winter, the steel
peeled away from the iron as soon as it got cold; Carnegie was only
momentarily discouraged.) For all his canniness and drive, he did not
like to talk business, much preferring to offer his voluble, good-
humored opinions on everything from public education to the poetry
of Robert Burns, which he loved to recite with special emphasis on the
rolling Scottish "R's."

With these shipboard companions and others, the Roosevelts
looked forward to a pleasant voyage. The only potentially discordant
note, Rebecca wrote in the journal she began the evening the Scotia
steamed out of New York harbor, was the presence of "the greatest
number of Jews."

The passage began placidly enough. Two days out, thick fog sur
rounded the ship but she continued to make steady progress until
noon, when her whistle shrieked just as the passengers sat down to

40 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

luncheon. The Scotia's wheels stopped churning. James rushed on
deck, followed by Rebecca and Rosy. There was an eerie silence.
Then, through the swirling fog off the port bow, James remembered,
u not five feet from us, an iceberg was slowly drifting past, so near you
could have easily jumped on it and so hard that there would have been
instant destruction if we had struck it." Under way again that after
noon, the Roosevelts spotted a second cliff of floating ice less than a
mile away. Rebecca slept in her clothes that night, terrified.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, however, and at Liverpool the
Roosevelts were ferried directly to the steamer Niagara for the choppy
trip across the English Channel to Le Havre. James was a veteran sailor
and relentlessly cheerful. But this time even he took to his bed, and
Rebecca wrote that she and Rosy were u much comforted" by having
James continually moan, " 'Why did we come this way?' "

They stayed at Le Havre for nearly two months. Tutors in French
and music came daily to Rosy's room, where a piano had been installed
so that he and James might play duets in the evenings, just before the
elder Roosevelts settled into their nightly game of bezique.

The little family spent hours on the stony beach, chasing the gray
crabs that scuttled in and out of the waves, and whenever the timid
North Atlantic sun permitted, they went into the water themselves.
Rosy was frightened of the ocean at first, and his father made him pay
for his own swimming lessons out of his allowance. The boy stuck
with it to please Mr. James, and was rewarded with a handsome toy:
"a beautiful screw boat," his father said, "a full-rigged steamer that
winds up and goes ten minutes in the waves." Rebecca ventured out
from a separate beach, holding on to ropes strung out through the surf
for the safety of the ladies.

There were long strolls along the waterfront, interrupted often
while James stopped to smoke his pipe and "talk horse" with idle
coachmen. The Roosevelts 7 affection for animals of every kind seems
to have been boundless. Rosy went to a pet shop every afternoon to
feed apricots to an appreciative monkey. Rebecca had a pet snail which
one day got loose and accompanied Mr. James on a promenade, cling
ing to his hat.

James himself longed "every day to have some kind of beast to
handle. I always pat the horses in the street and speak to the dogs,
sometimes to the disgust of their owners." Framed photographs of two
dogs they had left behind at Mount Hope hung on the wall of their
hotel room, and they finally broke down and bought a puppy that

Mr. fames 41

reminded them of their yellow terrier, "Jeff Davis." It proved trouble
some at first, Rebecca noted, "pulling at one end of the string and
James at the other, or else insisting upon walking with his head just
under my petticoat." And it howled all night until James intimidated
it into silence by "barking like a big dog."

Rosy made friends with three French children who were staying
at the hotel with their parents, the Count and Countess Alexandre
Walewski. The count was the president of the French Legislative
Assembly and the natural child of Napoleon I and Marie Walewska
of Poland. His resemblance to his father was so great that an old
soldier, hearing him speak at a funeral, covered his face with his hands
and wept. "I know this voice," he said. "I have loved it, and I never
thought I would hear it again." One morning the Roosevelts and
Walewskis rode out into the countryside to a wooded park where the
children played beneath the great trees while their parents sat on
blankets and ate their lunch of cherries and milk. They returned to the
hotel just in time for dinner, Rebecca remembered, "loaded with wild-
flowers and roses, the children in a gale."

French nobles were worth cultivating. Commoners were not.
James hiked to a likely-looking trout stream and was advised to ask the
local miller for permission to fish. The miller turned out also to be the
village mayor "a consequential little Frenchman," James wrote
who declared the waters off limits: "Dtfendu. " James hired a small boy
to point out the best holes and began casting anyway. He was arrested,
taken before the mayor again, and released with a lecture. Unrepent
ant, he walked downstream two miles and "poached all day. I did not
have much luck," he told John, "but enjoyed the forbidden fruit more
than good sport easily obtained."

In early August, the Roosevelts started for Switzerland. They vi
sited Rouen on the way, and showed Rosy the exact spot where Joan
of Arc was burned. And they dined at an inn where "the Maitre
D'Hdtel . . . portioned out food in such small quantities that it only
made us wish for more Imagine the skill of a man who can so divide
a small pair of boiled chickens among 3 5 people (counted) as to have
half a chicken left."

At Geneva, they went to church one evening to hear the organ
played. It was dark inside. A few dull lanterns dimly outlined the altar.
Before it stood a coffin, covered by a black pall embroidered with
skulls. "It certainly was spooky," Rebecca recalled, "and quite enough
to unsettle Rosy, who commenced to tremble and cry, half with fear

42 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

and half because he did not like to hear gay music when a dead man
was in the church. We could not pacify him." Later, their hotelkeeper
told James the coffin was a permanent fixture, carved from stone.

Rosy woke up shrieking a few nights later at Interlaken, and
begged to sleep in his parents' bed. The first few days of their stay
there, in lovely rooms overlooking the blinding wall of the Jungfrau,
were otherwise marred only by the nationality of their fellow guests.
"Oh, drat," Rebecca wrote. "Can we stand the clang of German
women all winter? There are several in the house and besides eating
with their knives, they are so noisy and greasy!"

Walking without James one afternoon, Rebecca and Rosy passed
near an asylum on the slope. "Several awful-looking creatures came
howling down the path," and again that night Rosy was too frightened
to sleep alone. He was ill the next day, and the doctor came to dose
him with castor oil.

That afternoon, September 17, the waiter brought their tea on a
tray, and with it a letter from John Roosevelt. It told of the Mount
Hope fire. "No word can express the shock of it," Rebecca said, James
especially mourned the loss of 400 fine cigars, and urged his brother
to search the ruins for a tin box that had held four gold watches,
including "dear father's, with his chain and seal." (The box was evi
dently never found.) The fire's origins were mysterious. The Gris-
wolds insisted it had been an accident, caused by a faulty flue in the
library chimney. James was sure it had been deliberately set, and came
to believe that the tenants' butler was the culprit, intending either to
cover up his own looting of the place or simply because he had grown
bored in the country and wanted to force his employer to move back
to the city, where life was more exciting.

Rosy was not told of the disaster until he felt better the next
morning. James and Rebecca agonized for several days, deciding
whether or not to sail right home. They resolved finally to stay in
Europe and to go on to Dresden for the winter, as planned.

There they rented a house at 4 Mosciasky Strasse and put an Irish
servant, Marie Cork, in charge of the staff of three German women.
Rosy was enrolled in a German school, the first school of any kind he
had ever attended. It terrified him. He came home weeping the first
day because the other boys had jeered when he had not known the
songs they were singing, and he trembled going back the next morning
because the master had announced to the class that he was about to buy
a new cane. He had split his old one flogging last year's pupils. A few

Mr. James 43

days later, Rosy came home with a bloody nose, James told John. u Of
course, my first question was if he whipped his antagonist and felt quite
satisfied with being informed that his foe retired with a loosened
tooth."

Rosy's sleep continued to be troubled. When he was awakened
suddenly one night, James noted, "he first talked German, then
French, and wound up with English. Poor baby, how dreadful it must
be to dream in three languages!"

It grew worse as tension at home was added to tension at school.
The servant Marie proved difficult. Rebecca had to scold her for "hav
ing more clothes in the wash than I had. She has been sulking all day.
We don't care." The German maids quit. Marie did, too, then pro
mised to do better, continued to sulk. It got so bad, Rebecca wrote, that
James was afraid to go downstairs, u as he is constantly seized and
attacked." Finally they fired her, and James himself drove her to the
railroad station. For the following twenty-four hours the Roosevelts
survived a crisis whose seriousness perhaps only a couple of their time
and class could fully appreciate: life without servants. James bought a
German phrase book, conducting "experiments" in case conversation
with tradesmen could not be avoided. Rebecca herself answered the
doorbell. Actual cooking and washing were out of the question, of
course; a hot supper was brought in from a nearby hotel, and a German
girl came in afterwards to tidy up. Still, Rebecca wrote, since Marie
left it had been "a most exciting day . . . and we marvel that we have
no servant and everything more comfortable than if Marie was here.
... If the house had been full of footmen in livery we could not have
been more at our ease."

The next day they hired two new German women: "About Two
our 'stube Mddchen' came, a nice looking little thing. She . . . says
'Schon ' whenever we look at her. At five, the cook arrived with low
curtseys and two yards of ear trumpet, a canary . . . and a dog."

The test of the new servants' skills came a few evenings later, when
General and Mrs. George Brinton McClellan came to dinner. Every
thing went perfectly. The food was hot and good, and "our little frau"
served it beautifully.

The McClellans were new and glamorous friends. Shortly after the
Roosevelts settled in, they found that the general and his wife, Mary,
were staying in a small house just around the corner at 2 Wiener
Strasse. They had been in Europe for several months, having left
America to ease the pain of the general's two great defeats: his removal

44

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

as commander of the Army of the Potomac by the Illinois politician
whom he had routinely dismissed as "Uncle Abraham," and the still
greater humiliation of having been defeated for the presidency by the
same tormentor.

The general liked Europe. Everywhere he went he was received as
an important man. "I hear no slanders/' he wrote home to his father-in-
law, "all treat me as a gentleman If I were at home now there would

probably be nothing for me to do but go into exile in Nevada or Utah
. . . This side of the water is more pleasant, I assure you." He would
stay in Europe for three years. Mary McClellan was pregnant with her
first child. The baby was due momentarily, and the general had gone
into what he called "winter quarters" at Dresden and sent for his
mother to help with the delivery.

Mr. James called on him one morning, and the two men took an
instant liking to one another. For the next eight months they managed
to get away from the ladies long enough to take a stroll or have a smoke
together nearly every day. In many ways they were natural compan
ions. At thirty-nine, the general was just two years older than Mr.
James, and like 1 him was a member of two old and prosperous families,
from Philadelphia rather than New York or New England, but at least
as distinguished as the Roosevelts and Aspinwalls.

And they were both Democrats. James Roosevelt had stayed a
Whig as long as he could. As the natural heirs of the Federalists, the
Whigs had been the party of his father and grandfather, and James had
been steeped in Whig traditions. He shared fully their belief in the
Union and a genuinely national government, in the rights of property
and the virtues of government by gentlemen above all, in their abhor
rence of the sort of executive power that had been so lustily enjoyed
by the Whigs' Democratic nemesis, Andrew Jackson.

As late as 1848, Mr. James had been a loyal admirer of the perennial
Whig presidential candidate, Henry Clay. No one knows precisely
when he moved to the Democrats, but perhaps it was in 1856, the
presidential year that forced most Whigs to find a new home. Their
old party's inability to hammer out a coherent position on the great
issue of slavery had rendered them largely impotent by then. The best
candidate they could come up with was the colorless ex-President
Millard Fillmore. Some Whigs, whose fear of immigrants neared para
noia, rallied to the short-lived American, or Know-Nothing, Party,
which had also nominated Fillmore. Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor
and Poughkeepsie friend of the elder Roosevelts, had been a frenzied

Mr. James 45

Know-Nothing pamphleteer. Party members most strongly opposed
to slavery enlisted in the bold new Republican Party, behind its dash
ing nominee, John Charles Fremont.

By contrast, the Democrats had managed to nominate a man who
promised calm and moderation, a compromise candidate who be
longed to neither the northern or southern factions of his party. He
was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Mr. James's old friend from
London. 10

Many of James Roosevelt's friends and other members of the family
made a different choice. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., became a Republi
can during the Civil War, for example. So did Mr. James's former
employer Benjamin Silliman and his uncle William Henry Aspinwall,
who would serve as Lincoln's confidential agent in London.

Mr. James had joined the Democrats, and he now found special
pleasure in discussing politics with his party's most recent presidential
nominee. Despite the general's frequent boast that he was "utterly
indifferent to contemporaneous praise or censure," he never forgot a
slight. And as he and Mr. James took their evening walks, he railed
against his enemies. He professed to have been appalled by Lincoln's
murder: "All who know me must know that I regard it with unmin-
gled horror and regret." But he was furious that the Secretary of War,
Edwin M. Stanton "that rascal," who he believed had poisoned Lin
coln's mind against him continued in office under the new President,

10. FDR seems to have believed that his father and grandfather were always Democrats, and
most of his biographers have agreed. Many of the members of his Cousin Theodore's family were
indeed members of that party long before the Civil War, and one of them, Judge James J.
Roosevelt, was a Tammany sachem and member of Congress.

But the descendants of Jacobus Roosevelt were different. Franklin Roosevelt's grandfather
was first a Federalist and then a Whig, and Mr. James remained a Whig about as long as there
was any life left in the party of his fathers. A letter to James from Dr. Isaac, written on February
25, 1848, while his son was still touring Europe, makes this clear: "Uncle William [Henry
Aspinwall] and John [Aspinwall] have become Taylorites [supporters of General Zachary Taylor
for the upcoming Whig presidential nomination] & Zack I think will be our next President. We
[the Whigs] had a large meeting in New York, William Vice President and John Sec'y. As soon
as you get through your studies I suppose Zack, if you desert your old friend [Henry] Clay, will
give you an office. I have not yet turned."

There is additional evidence that at least suggests James's Whiggery. The law itself was
predominantly a Whig profession in the 1840s; most American lawyers were Whigs, Benjamin
D. Silliman prominent among them. There must have been considerable clamor for jobs in
Silliman's office among young lawyers with the proper Whig credentials, and it seems unlikely
that he would have disappointed deserving members of his own party in favor of a Democrat,
no matter how pleasant and well connected. The precise date of James Roosevelt's conversion
to the Democrats is unknown; my account seems the most plausible to me, but further firsthand
evidence may someday alter it.

Source: Isaac Roosevelt's letter to Mr. James, Roosevelt Family Papers (hereafter RFP),
FDRL.

46 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Andrew Johnson. And he took a dim view of the black troops who had
helped win the war after he had left it: "I confess to a prejudice in favor
of my own race, and I can't learn to like the odor of either Billy Goats
or Niggers."

"I see a good deal of General McClellan," James told John, "and
like him so much." The McClellans were again the Roosevelts 7 dinner
guests on the evening of November 22, and a servant arrived the next
morning with a note from the general. His wife, Mary, had given birth
to a fine baby boy, and both the infant and his mother were doing well.
"A few hours earlier," Rebecca wrote, u and it might have happened
here." 11

The months passed pleasantly at Dresden. It was a lovely place to
spend the winter, a medieval city whose towers, bridges, artworks, and
opera houses had earned it the title "Florence on the Elbe." Rosy did
well in school despite his fears, winning one of five top prizes out of
240 boys. His father thought this a fine performance "for a Yankee boy.
I only wish we could keep him for two or three years at the same
school. He learns more in a month here than he would in a year at
home. There is no shirking."

Still, Rosy was isolated at Dresden, not encouraged to bring Ger
man boys home after school, and lonely. The Roosevelts decided
finally to have Rebecca's younger brother, Samuel Howland III,
brought over to provide some company. In mid-April, James set out
for England to pick up the boy. He was delayed by a storm while
crossing the Channel "I was turned nearly inside out," James wrote
to John and when he and Sam did not turn up in Dresden on the
twenty-fifth as he had promised, Rebecca was inconsolable. She took
to her bed, and even a visit from General McClellan did not help. She
wept with fear the whole night. James and Sam arrived, tired but safe,
on the twenty-sixth.

The next day was the thirteenth anniversary of their marriage, and
James presented Rebecca with a piece of fine Dresden china. The
Roosevelts were devoted to one another. She called him u my darling,"
or by a pet name, "Reamer," and worried extravagantly when he was
ill, always crying when he was away too long. Once, in New York,
she went to Grand Central to welcome him home from a business trip,
and when he did not get off the train he had missed his connection
was so distraught that she had to ask a policeman to take her home;

1 1. The baby boy was inevitably christened George Brinton McClellan, Jr.; he grew up to
become twice the Democratic mayor of New York (1903-1910).

Mr. James 47

she repaid the young officer with a basket of grapes two days later. Her
spontaneity and open affection pierced Mr. James's public reserve. "I
walked up 6th Avenue with him ... as far as 16th Street," she once
confided to her journal, u and as he forgot to kiss me before he left
home, I made him give me a kiss in the fish market, to the surprise of
all the butchers."

James in turn called her u dear Becky." He rarely traveled far with
out her, showered her with presents, and made sure she was always
surrounded by the flowers she loved. On her fortieth birthday in
Naples in 1870, he and Rosy would get up before breakfast and arrange
to have bouquets delivered to her all day long, "huge, thousands of
roses and camelias," she marveled, "they measured together thirty-six
feet in circumference."

But there was always another side to Mr. James, a free-wheeling,
gusty side which he seems to have kept from Rebecca and reserved
mostly for his brother, John. With him he joked freely about things
that would have been thought unseemly by anyone else the pretty
girls in short skirts who skated at Dresden and whose "display of limbs
is not modest," the dire effects of too much castor oil, the daring
bathing costumes worn by Frenchmen: "Not much more than a figleaf
. . . only a pair of worsted drawers with leg ends cut off near the thigh
and does not even cover the 'ar.' " Their mother wrote that John was
planning a trip to the south. "Why don't you bring back half a dozen
buck niggers?" James asked his brother. "We would have such a
shindy with the Paddys."

John got married while the Roosevelts were abroad, to Ellen
Crosby, the daughter of a Poughkeepsie physician. "Well, my dear
brother," James wrote, "you are in for it. There is no escape now
except a divorce. How I pity you. No more nice jolly times. You are
in the traces and if you attempt to kick over you will catch it. There
is no use in trying to rebel after an experience of thirteen years I find
the best way is to submit and go along steady." He also offered a bit
of advice: "Do not be nagged at any time, but especially in the early
morning. It destroys the peace of the day and [is] trying to the nerves
and constitution."

James shared the ups and downs of his business with his brother,
too, and whenever he went abroad, John handled his investments, saw
that his taxes were paid and watched over his estate. James had the
Times mailed to him everywhere he traveled so that he could keep
track of his stocks, and he worried constantly over the smallest details

48 BEFORETHETRUMPET

of life on his farm. Was the garden gate locked to keep out the pigs?
Had the ice house been filled? Had the stables been properly cleaned,
and had "Bessie" dropped a colt "all safe and sound?" If so, a check
for $50 should go to the owner of its sire. An old express bill for the
delivery of venison and game birds that had arrived at Hyde Park
"rot-eaten" should not be paid without a fight.

Sam Howland was just a year older than Rosy, and the two boys
became close if sometimes quarrelsome companions. "Here come the
boys," James wrote one afternoon. "They make an awful racket and
fight like cats. I have serious thoughts of having a pugilistic set-to with
coats off and a fair stand-up fight which I think would end their
everlasting skirmishings."

The Roosevelts left Dresden and began to make their meandering
way home on May 17, 1866, a year to the day after they had departed
from New York. They were now a party of five: Sam was still with
them, and so was a governess, remembered now only as "Marie," of
whom Rosy was very fond. Stopping for lunch on the road to Carls
bad, they were encircled by a crowd of ragged, jostling beggars clam
oring for alms. It was frightening. "We had no money," Rebecca
wrote, "and so gave them scraps of cold meat, which they took greedily
and ate like dogs."

The Roosevelts hurried on to the Hotel King George, where they
spent a placid month. The boys fetched fresh milk from a village cow
every morning and sometimes walked out into the countryside to buy
honey from the hive. James and Rebecca took the waters religiously,
then they all lunched at a lake pavilion, where Rosy and Sam once each
gave a large coin to "the little boy who opens the door, after which
he made us the most profound bows." One afternoon, Rebecca and
James came upon a merry-go-round set up in the square of the nearby
town of Hammes. A crowd of village children looked on without the
money for tickets. Mr. James offered the man in charge enough coins
to keep the carousel spinning for half an hour. Some fifty shouting
children clambered aboard "thick as berries in the boats," Rebecca
wrote, "and two or three on each horse. The sound of the hand organ
brought all the mothers to the doors with their knitting and . . . James
was greeted with smiles all through the village."

In June, the Roosevelt party moved on to St. Moritz, where they
went for donkey rides in the mountains. When Rosy's mount balked,
Mr. James hired a small boy to run backwards ahead of him up the
slope, holding out a fistful of thistles. They were driven up a glacier

Mr. James 49

and got down from the carriage to scrape the snow away and peer into
the clear green heart of the ice, and they climbed on foot up a moun
tainside to visit a frozen cave. It was a steep ascent. James had to pull
Rebecca behind him, their guide pushing from below: "I could actually
hear my heart beating," she remembered. On the way down, Rosy and
Sam "snowballed" Mr. James. In the evenings, James and Rebecca
enjoyed talking with an English guest, a Mr. Bullock, who had done
what the young Mr. James had only dreamed of doing he had fought
alongside Garibaldi. He was very quiet, Mr. James wrote, "and rather
Lord Dundrearish in his style, hair parted in the middle," but he had
"led the assault [on Naples] and brought off under a heavy fire many
wounded men. And all this for the mere sport of fighting."

In August they journeyed to Paris (after what Rosy described as
a "sad parting" with Mademoiselle Marie), in time for a great city-wide
fair. The fountains in the Place de la Concorde were "lighted with the
electric light," Rosy wrote, "and the Obelisque was beautifully lighted
by gas." The sky above the Tuileries exploded with fireworks; "the
rockets were superb and burned in the air, letting fall thousands of little
stars."

Then back to Le Havre where, Rosy noted, u we had quite a
pretty dish for dinner . . . eggshells blown out and filled with blanc
mange" and on to London, Liverpool, and home.

On October 12, just four days from New York and shrouded again
in fog, the Scotia churned past an immigrant ship, "so near," Rebecca
wrote, "that we could see and hear the people on board distinctly."

The gulf between the America for which those immigrants were
heading and that to which the Roosevelts now returned was nearly as
broad as the Atlantic. The city had always been a necessary evil for Mr.
James and Rebecca. He had to go there from time to time to tend to
business; she went with him for the social season, to visit relatives, to
attend the theater. A richly furnished brownstone at 15 Washington
Square made all this possible; membership in the finest clubs the
Union, Metropolitan, Century, University made it congenial. But
the reeking, airless world of the tenement slum was as remote and
mysterious to the Roosevelts as had been the world of the hungry
beggars who had so alarmed them near Carlsbad.

Home was among the shady lawns and river breezes of Hyde Park.

"The Hudson at Hyde Park is a broad, tranquil and noble river,"
the editor and essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis had written in 1853, "of

50 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

about the same character as the Bosphorus above Roumeli-bissar, or the
Dardanelles at Abydos. The shores are cultivated by the water's edge,
and lean up in graceful, rather than bold elevations; the eminences
around are crested with the villas of the wealthy inhabitants of the
metropolis at the river's mouth; summer-houses, belvideres and water-
steps, give an air of refreshment to the banks."

Mr. James shared Willis' enthusiasm for his neighborhood, but he
would not have been pleased with the writer's exotic analogy. It was
England, not Turkey, that Hyde Park was meant to resemble; the life
of the English country gentleman he and his neighbors labored to
recreate. Their stationery was headed "Hyde Park on the Hudson."
They gave their estates names that sounded as much as possible like
those of country houses in England. Josiah Wheeler had called the
Roosevelts' new home "Brierstone" when he had owned it. Mr. James
renamed it u Springwood" soon after he and his family moved in.
Neither name reflected anything about the land itself, but each had a
nice English resonance.

The nineteenth-century American historian William Hickling
Prescott visited England as a young man. He was not much impressed
by London society; it seemed simply more opulent than that of his
native Boston. But English country life was "quite another matter
altogether unique." The health and stability of English institutions,
Prescott believed, rested on the "predominance of the country and the
country interests" over those of the overcrowded turbulent city. In the
American context, Thomas Jefferson would have agreed. So would
Mr. James, and the habits and attitudes and hobbies of the English
country gentleman as set forth by Prescott were precisely those he
avidly adopted for himself.

The historian was not blind to the faults of the English aristocrat.
The Englishman had an air of insufferable arrogance about him, Pres
cott admitted, especially when abroad. He was intolerant, "his bigotry
surpassing everything in a quiet passive form that has been witnessed
since the more active bigotry of the times of the Spanish Philips." And
he was almost proud of the "exclusive, limited range of his knowl
edge." The Englishman traveled widely, Prescott said, but "the scope
of his ideas" was not enlarged by it: "the body travels, not the mind."

But at home, in the country, he was different. "The Englishman
is seen to most advantage in his country-house," he noted, "for he is
constitutionally both domestic and rural in his habits. His fireside and
his farm these are the places in which one sees his simple and warm-

Mr. James 51

hearted nature most freely unfolded. There is a shyness in an English
man, a natural reserve which makes him cold to strangers, and difficult
of approach. But corner him in his old house, a frank and full expres
sion will be given to his feelings . . ."

Certainly that was true of Mr. James. He was fully himself only at
Springwood, never happier than when involved in its everyday chores.
"This afternoon we walked over the farm," Rebecca wrote one day in
1870, "saw the pigs which are to be killed on Tuesday, then went to
the stable and fed Bill with carrots, then to the greenhouse with milk
for Pussy and over to Sebastian's with corn for the white turkeys." Mr.
James was proud that unlike the country seats of some of his neighbors,
his place turned a profit; he liked to think of it as a working farm and
objected when others called it an estate.

"I doubt," Prescott wrote of the English country gentleman, "if
ever there was so high a standard of morality which has such means
of self-indulgence at its command . . . and which occupies a position
that secures so much deference. Their respect for religion, at least for
the forms of it, is universal."

Mr. James inherited little of his father's pious desperation, but he
was always a dedicated churchman. Shortly after his marriage he had
left the Dutch Reform Church of his ancestors and joined the Episco
pal Church in which Rebecca had been raised.

St. James Church at Hyde Park was a small but handsome pseudo-
Gothic chapel, modeled after the country churches of England and
built of red brick, blanketed with ivy and surrounded by evergreens.
Mr. James served it all his life as a vestryman and sometimes as senior
warden. The wealthiest parishioners sat nearest the altar; his pew, with
its red silk cushions, was the third from the front on the left side of
the aisle, its door marked with his brass nameplate: "J. Roosevelt."

Prescott was especially impressed by the English gentleman's com
mitment to his community. "There are few of the great proprietors
. . ." he wrote, "who are not more or less occupied with improving
their estates and providing for the comforts of their tenantry."

The village of Hyde Park was tiny as late as 1925, fewer than 900
persons lived there and almost all its residents depended for their
livelihood on one or more of the great estates. Mr. James had a sober
proprietary concern for their welfare. He took an interest in the public
school and in conditions at the county jail, and served for many years
as manager of the asylum that stood on the site of Mount Hope. And
when news came of the great Chicago fire in 1870, he organized a

52 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

subscription drive to help the city rebuild, canvassing his neighbors by
carriage and raising $1,000 in a single day.

In 1871 he was elected to a two-year term as town supervisor on
the Democratic ticket. In that post he may not have won friends among
his less well-to-do colleagues on the board when he urged that no board
member receive his three-dollar per diem allowance unless a meeting
were actually held.

Three years later, local party officials tried to talk him into running
for the State Senate. His attractions for them were obvious enough: He
was by now a loyal Democrat, widely respected and admired, even by
his predominantly Republican neighbors and, most important, he was
wealthy enough to finance his own campaign. Politics clearly fas
cinated Mr. James, and Rebecca knew it. "James went to a political
meeting," she wrote on October 18, 1874. "I was dreadfully afraid he
would be nominated . . . but he got home safely." In an autobiograph
ical fragment hastily written in his old age, Mr. James said, "[I] have
always refused to accept any nomination for Public Office, repeatedly
refused nomination for Congress, State Senate and Assembly." He was
proud to have resisted temptation, as his father would have wanted him
to do. But he was even prouder of having been asked.

The final near-universal characteristic among English country gen
tlemen noted by Prescott, was their love of the outdoors. "Every man
hunts or shoots. No man is too old to be in the saddle some part of the
day, and men of seventy years and more follow the hounds and take
a five-barred gate at a leap." Mr. James hunted, fished, skated, and had
his old boathouse poled downstream by canal boat from the riverfront
at Rosedale and set up below Springwood so that he and Rosy could
row in the evenings in their double wherry. He was a commodore in
the local yacht club, and in the ice-boating club whose bladed vessels
flashed across the river's frozen surface in winter.

But horses were his passion. He loved to ride and drive them. His
barn held a bewildering assortment of vehicles three sleighs, a high
phaeton, a skeleton wagon, a rockaway, a landau, a spark, a station
wagon (for carrying heavy trunks to and from the depot), and smaller
versions of several of these, meant to be pulled by Rosy's ponies. There
was also a fine carriage with brass fittings, made especially for Mr.
James in London and so big that when it arrived in its crate at the
Poughkeepsie landing, he had it unpacked at the riverside and proudly
drove it home himself.

He was best known in sporting circles as a breeder of superb

Mr. fames 53

trotters. His prize was "Gloster," born at Springwood in 1870. A sleek
brown gelding with a phenomenally long stride, it covered a mile in
2:17 % seconds in October of 1873, setting a mark that stood for years.

Later that autumn, Franklin Roosevelt would write, "a gentleman
who had driven up from the station in a frock coat and silk hat and
introduced himself as Leland Stanford of California" offered Mr.
James $15,000 for his champion. Stanford, who had built the Central
Pacific Railroad and served as Republican governor of California, was
a well-known sportsman, interested in the scientific breeding of horses.
Mr. James accepted his offer. The horse was shipped west, but before
it could race again it was killed in a train wreck. 12

Shortly thereafter, perhaps guilty at having indirectly caused the
death of his handsome horse, Mr. James withdrew entirely from the
trotting world, saying that it was no longer a sport for gentlemen. He
continued to keep horses, though, and like William Prescott's
prototypical country gentleman, he managed a daily ride until just a
few weeks before his death.

Despite the loss of Gloster, life at Springwood was almost uni
formly tranquil. "A beautiful morning," Rebecca wrote. "Drove James
to the station in the pony carriage and went for him in the evening.
The day was a blank."

James got home from the city at three-thirty one morning. "One
of my under-farmers met me at the station," he remembered, "and
when I apologized for keeping him up so late, he said 'Oh! Mr. Roose
velt. I enjoyed it. I have never been up so late before in my life.' " The
household staff was smoothly supervised by Elspeth McEachern, a
brisk and cheerful Scotswoman, whom the Roosevelts called "Eles-
pie."

Friends sometimes came out to play croquet on the sloping lawn
or to ride or just to sit on the piazza and watch the steamboats glide
by on the wide river below. One day a drunken coachman had to be
dismissed; on another, there were "great scenes with Polly [the family
parrot] who would not go back into her cage. Rosy finally got her in
by fright and won five dollars from his Pops."

The outside world rarely intruded without invitation, though once
all three Roosevelts hurried down to the front gate to watch the

12. The local stable boy who had gone west with Gloster managed to salvage the horse's
flowing four-foot tail, and when FDR became governor of New York, he had it mounted on a
wooden plaque for him as a gift. Roosevelt hung it in his bedroom, first in the governor's mansion
at Albany, then in the White House, It is now displayed in a glass case in Mr. James's old stable
at Hyde Park.

54 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

animals from Barnum's circus plod by, African lions roaring in painted
cages and a herd of Indian elephants raising clouds of dust on the road
to Poughkeepsie.

Mr. James did not discuss business at home. Rebecca kept a daily
journal for nine years. There are in it only a handful of references to
what her husband did on his trips to town, nearly all of them clustered
in two years, 1873 and 1875. These years saw him disappointed but
not embittered by the sudden and unexpected disintegration of two
schemes through which he had hoped to become a man of great wealth
and power.

Consolidated Coal was the first of these. It seemed a spectacular
success, controlling five out of every six tons of bituminous coal
shipped from the Cumberlands.

And so did the second scheme. In 1871, Thomas A. Scott, the able
and aggressive senior vice president of the mighty Pennsylvania Rail
road, sought to win control of all the railroad lines south of the Poto
mac and to beat out the rival Baltimore & Ohio into the bargain. The
instrument he chose was a holding company, the Southern Railway
Security Company, which in conjunction with a number of prominent
New York investors, flooded millions of dollars into southern rail
stocks to build its network. James Roosevelt was a heavy investor, and
in 1872 Scott made him its president. Under his leadership, Mr. James
wrote, the S.R.S.C. came to control "all the southern lines . . . from
Richmond to New Orleans and southwest to Memphis."

When Mr. James went south in early 1873 to inspect his railroads,
Rebecca went with him. She found it a foreign country, far cruder
than any of the European regions in which the Roosevelts had lived.
At church in Richmond a "Vile little boy in the pew spitted a spittoon
full." At Charlotte, the hotel was cold and filthy, and when Rebecca
tried "to sit in the parlor while my room was cleaned ... I found a
lady? sitting there smoking a pipe over the fire." At Columbia, they
were taken to see the state legislature in session: "What a sight! I hope
I may never see it again. More than 2/3 members were negroes and
some of them not a bit better than apes writing or making believe to
write. The senate was going through a fight. Two darkies calling each
other awful names."

Their car was derailed in the middle of the night on the way to
Atlanta. The Roosevelts crawled out a window and continued their
journey in the mail car, Rebecca sitting on the sacks. And once they
got to the Georgia capital, she wrote, "there was nothing to see except

Mr. fames 55

bad roads and jews shops, the Hotel and RR depot being the only two
good buildings."

The Roosevelt train was held up again in Alabama so that the party
could spend an hour or two "lingering over some very fine bridges
which James walked over in his slippers." There were fleas on the train
to Vicksburg, and heavy rains at Chattanooga, where "one evening we
had a little supper of quail with toast, shivered in our damp bedroom,
where the tides had been rising all day in one corner [and] could not
sleep for ever so long, owing to the pigs and dogs outside the window
and the rats in the walls."

They were glad to get back to Springwood for the summer. There,
on September 19, Rebecca noted in her diary, "Terrible time in town.
So many failures. James very much excited." Well he might have been.
The great Philadelphia banking house of Jay Cooke & Company had
collapsed without warning the day before, and the shock waves were
spreading into every corner of the economy. They would continue to
be felt for a decade and a half. Factories closed down, the laying of new
railroad track halted, the demand for coal dwindled.

Just five days later, Mr. James was called to Philadelphia to confer
with Scott and other officials of the Pennsylvania line. He returned the
evening of the twenty-fourth, Rebecca noted, "and was a little cross. "
On October 3, he was allowed to resign the presidency of the Southern
Railway Security Company.

The stockholders of Consolidated Coal were more patient, but they
too were dissatisfied by the plummeting value of their stock, and in the
spring of 1875, Mr. James and his closest allies including Uncle
William Henry Aspinwall and his friend Warren Delano II of New-
burgh were swept from the board of directors.

Mr. James was momentarily depressed by these defeats. For several
days after the Consolidated Coal vote Rebecca noted that he was
"anxious" and "miserable." But he bounced back fast. He had never
invested more money in any of his schemes than he could afford. He
seems to have enjoyed business much as he had enjoyed trotting. It was
a challenge and worth working at, but it never ran his life.

One afternoon at Springwood, he looked up from his writing table
to see robins preparing to take possession of the corners of his piazza
for their summer nests. "I often wonder," he wrote, "why men are
satisfied to live all their lives between brick walls and thinking of
nothing but money and the so-called recreations of so-called society
when there is so much enjoyment in the country."

It was Rebecca's health, not business, that worried him most. It had

56 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

begun to fail as early as 1869. She had grown heavy, suffered from
chest pains, coughed constantly, tired easily. Nothing the doctor sug
gested seemed to help. "Dear Becky" spent three weeks in bed that
spring, James noted, "very much blushed and prostrated." He had
slowed down, too, suffering from ghostly back pains he believed only
European waters could alleviate.

They went abroad again that summer. In England they inspected
Rugby School (where James briefly thought he might send Rosy, now
sixteen), and in London ordered fourteen silver-plated coats of arms,
a new set of harness, and new coachmen's uniforms with silver buttons
bearing the Roosevelt crest. In Paris, James and Rosy spun through the
Bois de Boulogne on their velocipedes and spent one whole day shop
ping for "carriages and diamonds." The Roosevelts tried the grape
cure at Merau, strolling slowly together beneath arbors heavy with
blue clusters of fruit. "People stuff with them all day," Rebecca wrote,
"and everyone carries a little open basket on their arm which is con
stantly replenished."

Nothing helped. Rebecca stayed in her hotel room during most of
the trip, too weak to go out, while James and Rosy "my two lovers"
saw the sights, then hurried back to her in the evenings with bou
quets.

At Rome they met the energetic Theodore Roosevelt clan, then
tumbling their way across Europe on their first family Grand Tour.
Rosy was delighted. There were four other children with whom to see
the sights: Anna (called "Bamie," and a great favorite of Mr. James),
Theodore, Elliott, and Corinne. They all went together to St. Peter's
to see Pope Pius IX carried past them in a sedan chair. The pontiff
stopped in front of the massed Roosevelts and, as eleven-year-old
Theodore boasted in his diary that night, "he extended his hand to me
and I kissed it! Hem!! Hem!!"

The two families came home together, too, through very rough
seas. Rebecca and Martha Roosevelt (whom everyone called "Mittie")
spent days huddled together on the pitching deck, their steamer blan
kets soaked with spray, salt caked on their veils. Their deck chairs had
to be lashed to the mast, but anything was better than trying to ride
it out in the close air below deck.

Rebecca did not get better. The doctor ordered her to stop climb
ing stairs; a servant had to carry her gently up and down to bed in his
arms. James had an elevator installed in the New York house, and
another at Springwood. When he gave a supper for some 200 children

Mr. James 57

at the Hyde Park schoolhouse he brought an easy chair for her so that
she might watch the fun without growing too tired.

On a brilliant afternoon in early August 1876, James took her
aboard his yacht for a cruise on Long Island Sound, hoping that the
sun and sea air would ease her cough. Not long after they got under
way she suffered a massive heart attack. James ordered the yacht back
to the dock and helped carry her home to Washington Square.

She died there on the twenty-first.

Dr. Isaac had been buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn,
and he had wished that his sons and their families would be buried
there, too. But for James and Rosy and for Rebecca, Hyde Park had
been home, and her body was taken there, to the shady graveyard
behind St. James. Mr. James hoped someday to be buried beside her,
and drew up plans for a monument of Scotch granite large enough for
both of them to be built above her grave upon his death.

"I don't care much where I go," James wrote to his mother from
London that fall, "but . . . would rather keep on the move." Hyde Park
held too many memories for him to spend the winter there, and for
several months he visited old friends in England and wandered in
France and Spain. Rosy had sailed with him in October, but had to
return to Columbia College in January.

Mr. James came home alone in the spring, to Springwood, where
he planned to live "very quietly." Elespie continued to run the house
hold. He went into town on business, still dined at his clubs, and
attended parties at the invitation of friends. But he was in his fifties
now, his whiskers silvery, and he seemed sure to live out the remainder
of his life a widower, comfortable and much admired, but lonely.

Then sometime in 1877 he fell in love again with Anna Roose
velt, Bamie, Theodore Roosevelt's older sister. It was not surprising
that he was drawn to a member of the family. It was a Roosevelt
custom to marry cousins he had already done it once himself and
the idea of linking the Hyde Park and Oyster Bay branches of the
family must have appealed to him.

But Bamie was very young, just twenty-two in 1877, less than half
his age, a full year younger than Rosy. Mr. James had always taken an
avuncular interest in her, had liked to take her for long toboggan rides
when she came up to Hyde Park to visit Rosy as a little girl. She was
not beautiful; her heavy-lidded eyes made her look older than she was,
and Pott's disease, a form of tuberculosis that assaults the bones, had

58 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

left her with a distorted back and almost constant pain. But she was
an extraordinary person: wise and capable well beyond her years her
niece Alice Roosevelt Longworth always insisted that had Bamie been
born a man she would have become President, not her brother and
she was unusually sympathetic. People confided in her, and she was
intensely interested in the lives of those who were doing things she
could not do herself. All the members of her own family brought her
their troubles. She was "kind of a feminine little Atlas," Theodore
Roosevelt once said, "with a small world on her shoulders."

After Rebecca's death, Mr. James added to that burden, confiding
his sadness to her as he did perhaps to no one else. He called frequently
at the Roosevelt home on West Fifty-seventh Street, and he wrote to
Bamie often. A few of his letters have survived. He had kept up a brave
front during Christmas of 1877, for example his second without
Rebecca but it had been "stupid," he told Bamie, "not gay."

In February of 1878, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., died. Bamie had
been his favorite child, and she had adored him in return. The loss was
enormous. Mr. James offered sympathy. Perhaps in her grief she ini
tially responded to his solicitude more strongly than she might have
otherwise. Mr. James was in fact old enough to be her father. He even
resembled him somewhat; they had sometimes been mistaken for one
another on the street.

Mr. James felt encouraged. He continued to write to Bamie, press
ing his suit more strongly now, but always couched in the most decor
ous and formal language.

"I am all alone in my country house this bright sunny Sunday
afternoon," he wrote in March, "and seated before the fire, have been
wondering if you would like to get a letter from me. I suppose I should
have asked formal permission last Tuesday evening to write you, but
I did not get a chance to, or perhaps to tell the truth, I still retain, old
as I am, a certain shyness of my childhood days. ... I hope however
you will not think me too bold."

By May he was so eager for even a glimpse of her that any pretext
would do. When he heard she would be traveling aboard a train that
would halt briefly at Poughkeepsie, he promised that he would be
waiting on the platform with his dog "on the arrival of the train in
order that you may give dear little Budge the pleasure of a ten-minute
interview. I am sure he will know you, as he never forgets people he
liked."

He sent her little gifts, including a paper knife, hoping that "now

Mr. James 59

and then, when you are using it, and deep in some book, it may serve
to give you one little thought of me."

In the autumn of 1879, Mr. James was abroad again, and when he
arrived at Pau in the French Pyrenees in October, he was delighted to
find a letter from Bamie and hurried to answer it: "If you knew the
pleasure it gave me to sit down in that bright sunlight to read all that
you are doing . . . you would be fully repaid for your trouble and
kindness," he wrote. "I must confess, however, that it made me fear
fully homesick, as I have still such a longing to be with you all once
more."

Because Bamie had never visited Pau, he continued, it would be
"impossible for you to realize the contrast between this Sunday and the
last. Last Sunday I was in London, yellow dank fog, so dark in the
house that even lamps gave but little light; dismal gloomy streets
deserted because one could not get about; you were so depressed that
you felt even your best friends have deserted you. Today such a blue
sky and warm sunlight as you only get in the South of France and
Italy. I am writing with all my windows open looking out on the
magnificent snow-clad chain of the Pyrenees. . . . The whole country
is as green and fresh as May." The season had hardly begun, Mr. James
continued, but every room was full. "I am happy so far to find only
one American family. ... I have never liked Pau because there are so
many of my own country people here, and the set is not always the
best. I do not expect I shall be so troubled by their society as a single
man is not much sought after, unless he puts himself forward."

He was thinking constantly of Bamie now. She was working too
hard on her charities; they would wear her down if she was not careful.
He had gone riding one afternoon, along shady lanes that reminded
him of the paths around her country home at Oyster Bay: "I so wish
you could have been with me, it was such intense enjoyment."

And he worried that some of her letters seemed surprisingly re
mote: "Do you know I imagined your last letter was a little stiff?
Sometimes I am afraid you think I write too freely to you, but you are
the only person I ever go to with all my little trials, and I have always
talked to you even more freely, and writing is only expressing one's
thoughts on paper instead of orally, and I do not see the difference."

James returned to America early in 1880 and shortly thereafter
asked Bamie to marry him. It was "rather terrifying for a young girl,"
a member of the family recalled. Mr. James was "an old man," remote
and "rather stiff." Bamie liked him, but there had never been any

60 BEFORETHETRUMPET

question of love. She felt badly that he had so misunderstood her
feelings and could not bring herself to hurt him directly.

Her mother, Mittie, stepped in, gently turning him away with the
greatest possible tact. Mr. James seems to have taken it well. Perhaps
it had simply been another gamble that had not quite paid off. He
continued to call at West Fifty-seventh Street.

And there, one soft April evening in 1880, he attended a small
dinner. Bamie and her sister Corinne were there. So was their mother.
And so was an astonishingly beautiful young woman named Sara
Delano, whom Bamie introduced as one of her closest friends.

u He talked to her the whole time," Mittie told Bamie after the
guests had gone home. "Why, he never took his eyes off her."

CHAPTER

ALGONAC

Once during her son's presidency, Sara Delano Roosevelt was asked
why the Oyster Bay Roosevelts had grown so antagonistic toward the
Hyde Park branch of the family. "I can't imagine," she said, "unless
it's because we're better-looking than they are."

Certainly Sara Delano was better-looking than almost anyone. A
photograph of her, made about the time Mr. James first saw her, shows
why he was transfixed. She was one of four daughters of Warren
Delano II of Newburgh who were known to New York society as "the
beautiful Delano sisters," and she is sometimes said to have resembled
the ideal American beauty made popular a decade later by the artist
Charles Dana Gibson. There is a superficial resemblance. She was tall
and had the Gibson girl's long graceful neck, her large eyes and up
swept hair, her fine regular features of the kind inevitably called "chis
eled."

But she was not a girl in 1880. She was twenty-six, half Mr. James's
age, and precisely Rosy's, but past the age when most women of her
class married. Her chin was square and stubborn, and there was already
something regal, reserved substantive about her.

She retained those qualities all her life. Even at eighty-six, in a
newsreel made in Paris where she had gone to visit her sister Dora in
the early spring of 1940, she has an extraordinary impact. Surrounded
by photographers and by reporters shouting questions in two lan
guages, she is unruffled, removed, yet somehow in charge. She stands

62 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

straight, gazes directly into the camera, and answers the questions she
wishes to answer slowly, with care, in a mellow, beautifully modulated
voice. Her French is flawless; her accent when speaking English al
most British in its crisp precision.

What are her impressions of France on this visit?

"Pour moi, c'est toujours la belle France, sympathique et loyale."

Does she think France will be invaded?

She doesn't know, of course, but if so, the French army which she
has seen parading "is ready for anything. "

Will FDR run again for the White House?

"I have never even heard him speak of a third term. He always
considers the pleasure of returning to his home at Hyde Park."

What she says is banal. The way she says it the fact that she has
said it makes it important.

She herself first experienced the pleasures of Hyde Park just a few
weeks after she met Mr. James. She may have been invited to visit that
very first evening, at Mittie Roosevelt's table. Mr. James knew her
father fairly well; they had been allies on the board of Consolidated
Coal. And he was at least slightly acquainted with her mother, Cather
ine Lyman Delano.

Now he wrote to Mrs. Delano directly, asking whether "Miss
Sallie" might be allowed to visit Springwood with some friends in
early May.

Mrs. Delano granted permission, and on April 7, Sara Delano came
to Hyde Park for the first time, accompanied by a full complement of
escorts: Bamie and Corinne Roosevelt, and their mother. They stayed
a week, taking long carriage rides on the Albany Road beneath the
branches of the big old trees that then formed an unbroken leafy vault
that ran for miles. There were visits to St. James and to Rosedale,
where Sara was introduced to Mr. James's brother and sister-in-law
and to his mother, now an old lady in a lace cap. There were quiet
strolls through the woods, boat rides on the river, tea on the piazza.

One morning, Mr. James asked Sara if she would be kind enough
to arrange the flowers for the luncheon table. She agreed, gathering a
bouquet from the enclosed garden and choosing a blue-green English
bowl of Oriental design. It was shallow and wide-mouthed, not ideal
for arranging flowers, but she fussed until she got them right, and Mr.
James was delighted.

More than half a century later, in 1932, Sara wrote to her son how

Algonac 63

grateful she still was for that first invitation to Springwood. Had she
not come, she said, "I should now be 'old Miss Delano' after a rather
sad life." And as often as she could until the end for some sixty years
i n a n she would continue to arrange fresh flowers daily in that bowl.

Before she returned to Algonac, her home, twenty miles down
river, she and Mr. James seem to have reached a secret understanding.
He would ask her father for her hand. If her father agreed, she would
gladly marry him.

Algonac's name was said to have been derived from the Algonquian
words for "hill" and "river," and it was in every way a grander place
than Springwood. It was more than twice as large, with forty rooms,
and stood on the opposite side of the Hudson on a high hill that jutted
far out into the river, so that the house was nearly surrounded on three
sides by water. From its tall bracketed tower there were views of the
sparkling Hudson and the far-off mountains, north and south. A wall
of trees and flowering shrubs hid the compound from the road, and
visitors passed through stone gates to approach the house along a
graded gravel road that coiled through some sixty acres of lawns and
orchards and formal beds of flowers.

Mr. James made that journey one bright morning in late May.

Warren Delano II, the absolute master and vigilant guardian of this
tranquil walled-off world, was a formidable man, blind in one eye and
able to walk only with a cane, but at seventy-one still big and fierce-
looking. His gray side-whiskers were enhanced by a swooping mus
tache and a protruding tuft of beard below his lower lip.

He had decided views about everything, and they were rarely
challenged, either by his eight children, his admiring wife, or his
invited guests. His father had taught him that tuberculosis was the
product of too little fat in the diet, and so a soft yellow brick of butter
always sat in front of his plate from which he pared thick slices for his
children and made sure they ate them.

He had unshakable convictions about religion, too: "There is no
standing room for any creed between our Unitarian faith and the Papal
church." And about labor: "I cannot and will not pay any man more
than $1.50 a day" for ten hours' work, he once told one of his sons;
if workers complained, they could always be replaced by immigrants,
"a new element that knows the value of shelter, food & clothing."

And he was an implacable Republican, fond of saying that while
all Democrats were not horse thieves, it had been his experience that
all horse thieves were Democrats.

64 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

He had subjected every suitor for his daughters' hands to an exact
ing interrogation. Some years earlier, Sara or one of her sisters had
invited two young men to visit Algonac. One of them had been a
Harvard classmate of Sara's brother Warren Delano III, and her father
wrote to his son right away: "Mr. Coles is accredited with being your
friend and seems . . . bright and intelligent and I dare say is better than
he looks. . . . But what do you know of him and how did he stand at
Cambridge and what is he doing now! Who and what are his parents
and family, etc.?"

When another young man of whom Mr. Delano did not approve
sent Sara flowers, he drafted a formal note at once courteous and
dismissive which she dutifully copied out in her own hand and sent
off.

Mr. Delano greeted Mr. James warmly, understandably thinking
that he had simply come to make a social call on an old friend. The
true purpose of the visit dawned slowly; and when things became clear,
he was not pleased. There were plenty of objections to the match. Mr.
James was an Episcopalian for one thing. Then, too, he and Sara had
only known one another for a few weeks. Above all there was the
question of Mr. James's age.

James Roosevelt was patient but persistent. He loved Sara, would
always cherish her, could promise her a comfortable quiet life on the
Hudson very much like that she had led at Algonac. Presumably he
avoided discussing politics on this visit; some time would have to pass
before Warren Delano grudgingly admitted that his son-in-law had
demonstrated that one could simultaneously be a gentleman and a
Democrat.

Certainly Mr. James's prosperity and good reputation were well
established, and Mr. Delano liked him, though he had at least once
confidentially questioned his sense of purpose. (During a short-lived
internal squabble within Consolidated Coal he had worried to his son
that Mr. Roosevelt's good manners and charm would make him "vi
brate" between two factions when he should stand on principle and
side with Warren Delano.)

Sara was not present at these discussions about her future, of
course, but she must have made her feelings known to her mother in
private, and perhaps to her father as well. Perhaps, too, Mrs. Delano
had delicately pointed out to her husband that she had been only
slightly over half his age when they had been married thirty-seven
years before.

In any case, Mr. Delano did not reject the suit outright, and a few

Algonac 65

days later, after Mr. James had returned to Springwood, Sara's older
sister Dora and her husband, Will Forbes, went up for a five-day visit.
Clearly they had been sent to inspect the Roosevelt holdings and Mr.
James himself.

They evidently pronounced themselves satisfied, for James Roose
velt continued to call at Algonac, 1 and in late July he and Sara an
nounced their engagement.

Friends and family were astonished. Elliott Roosevelt thought Mr.
James a "sly old chap" for having conducted his courtship in secret,
but believed him devoted to Sara. Elliott's sister Bamie wrote to the
couple expressing both her pleasure and her surprise. She was de
lighted that Sara and Mr. James had found one another "it is hard to
think of two people who will be more absolutely happy together than
you both" but she was a little concerned that everything had hap
pened so fast. Their courtship had lasted just ten weeks.

Mr. James wrote back from his room at Algonac. "7 do not think
the affair has been in the least rapid or bewildering," he said. u As you
know Miss Sallie rather well, you must know how very difficult it was
to win her."

Mr. Delano wrote of the engagement to his son Warren III. The
"suddenness or haste" with which everything had happened had so
stunned him, he said, that "I can scarcely yet realize that it is a veritable
fact." Still, he now professed to be pleased. "The great secret of our
dear Sallie's life ... is being divulged. ... Of this choice of our dear
one, I can say that it is very satisfactory to me, to Mama, to each and
all of the family. Both Roosevelt and Sallie seem to be earnestly,
seriously, entirely in love." (The use of "Roosevelt" rather than
"James" in this letter at least suggests that Mr. Delano was still not
entirely comfortable with the coming marriage; he called his other
sons-in-law by their first names.) The engagement, he continued, "re
lieved my mind of many anxieties! It leaves my child within compara
tively little distance from here . . . and so far as I can know or judge,
it assures her of all the comforts and necessary luxuries of life."

The comforts and necessary luxuries with which Sara Delano had
always been surrounded had been hard won by her father. The clan
destine nature of the trade upon which he built much of his fortune,

1. Many years later the Roosevelt coachman was still grumbling to his family about the
inconvenience of these visits: "I'd take him . . . there [to Algonac] and I never got back till five
in the morning."

Source: Nancy Fogel interview with Albert and Mary Paul, FDRL.

66 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

his subsequent struggle to overcome financial disaster and rebuild, and
his simultaneous effort to shield every member of his big family from
the stern realities of life out from under Algonac's sheltering trees
all marked her character in ways that would in turn mark her son's.

The Delanos were an old family in America, older even than the
Roosevelts, and at least as proud of their ancestry. Sara Delano was
fond of saying that her son was "a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all."

The first American Delano was Philippe de la Noye, a Huguenot
who arrived at Plymouth Colony in 1621. He came out of love, not
religious zeal, hoping to marry Priscilla Mullens (the same Priscilla
with whom Myles Standish and John Alden were later smitten). His
dramatic arrival on her doorstep did him no good. She turned him
down, and he did not marry for thirteen more years. When he did, he
chose another Englishwoman, Hester Dewsbury, with whom he had
several children. One of these, Jonathan Delano, married Mercy War
ren, fought in King Philip's War, and was rewarded for his service
with an 800-acre tract of land at New Bedford, Massachusetts, which
then encompassed the coastal village of Fairhaven. 2

There his sons and their sons prospered as mariners and whalers
and shipbuilders, and there Warren Delano II was born in 1809. His
grandfather Ephraim had been a sea captain. His father, the first War
ren, had begun his career at sea at nineteen, ferrying cargoes of corn
and salt, bathwood and potatoes to New Orleans and Liverpool and
the Canary Islands. Later he purchased interests in a number of fine
ships, came to own several more, and was captured at sea and endured
two grim weeks aboard a British prison ship after the War of 1812 had
officially ended. He returned to Fairhaven in 1815, alive but "sick
enough," he said. After that he built himself a great rambling house and
settled into a lucrative if less eventful life ashore as a whaling executive.

One of his eldest son's earliest memories was of being bundled up

2. An eager-to-please nineteenth-century genealogist once delighted his Delano patrons by
tracing their forebears in Europe all the way back to a Roman patrician family, the Actii, who
were said to have staked a claim to a corner of French Flanders in the final days of the Empire.

Whatever the truth of that story, the history of the American clan is rich enough in color
and incident Among its livelier members: Thomas Delano, Philippe's son, who was fined by the
Massachusetts Bay Colony for having sexual relations with his wife before marriage, wed Mary
Alden, the daughter of the girl his father had pursued to the New World; Captain Amasa Delano,
who circled the globe three times and took down the first account of the Bounty mutineers'
colony on Pitcairn Island; Captain Paul Delano, who commanded the Chilean fleet that helped
end Spanish rule in Peru; and Dutch-born Adelaide Delannoy, seduced by the American actor
Junius Brutus Booth, who became the mother of Edwin and John Wilkcs Booth.

Sources: Daniel W. Delano, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence, and Nathan
Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles, pages 179-180.

Algonac 67

by his mother and hurried aboard a boat and taken to Acushnet at the
head of the Acushnet River during the war with England; a British
frigate had sailed into Buzzards Bay and threatened to shell Fairhaven.
So many women and children were sheltered in one house that night,
Warren would later tell his grandson Franklin Roosevelt, that the
smallest children were put to bed on the stairs.

It was probably inevitable that Warren II would first seek to make
his fortune from the sea; it is unlikely that he ever seriously considered
any other life. But his father knew from experience the risks of actual
seafaring; the business side of the maritime trade was the place for a
likely young man to make his mark. Young Warren was graduated
from Fairhaven Academy at fifteen in 1824. Two years later, his father
had him apprenticed as a junior clerk to Hathaway and Company, a
Boston importer; later he worked for Goodhue and Company, one of
the biggest import firms in New York, gaining what one business
associate later called "a first rate mercantile education."

In 1833, he sailed for China as supercargo aboard the ship Com
merce, plunging through heavy seas around the Horn and stopping at
several ports along the western coast of South America. He was
twenty-four. At Canton he was offered a junior partnership in the new
firm of Russell, Sturgis and Company of Boston and Manila. In 1840,
at thirty-one, he would become a senior partner with Russell and
Company, by then the largest American firm in the China trade. The
object of every partner was to gain a "competence" $100,000 be
fore returning home. Warren Delano would earn at least two, one with
each of the trading companies he served.

The China trade was already a century and a half old when Warren
arrived in Canton. Britain was the dominant power, but American
ships had been competing with her since 1785. Tea and silk were the
chief Chinese commodities, for which the Americans traded an odd
assortment of foreign goods that included sheets of tin from New
England mills, beaver and fox pelts, sandalwood logs stripped from the
forests of Hawaii, and ginseng, the man-shaped root that grew wild
along the Hudson and which the Chinese believed held aphrodisiac
powers.

The politics of the trade were complex and sometimes treacherous.
The Manchu emperor at Peking believed that the Americans and other
foreigners were Fan Kuei barbarians tribute-bearing vassals un
worthy even of simple courtesy and pitiful in their desperation for
Chinese goods. China, on the other hand, needed nothing from the

68 BEFORETHETRUMPET

west. "The Celestial Empire possesses all things in abundance and
lacks no products within its borders. There is therefore no need to
import the manufactures of outside barbarians."

To insure that his subjects' contacts with these ill-mannered outsid
ers were minimal, the emperor limited all trade to the port of Canton,
and further decreed that the western "devil-ships" had to anchor at
Whampoa, twelve miles from the city at the mouth of the Pearl River.
Goods were unloaded onto barges for the trip upriver to the quay.
There, all trading was done within a tiny enclave, barely one quarter
mile square, where Warren Delano and the other traders lived,
worked, and stored their goods in a block of thirteen whitewashed
factories.

There were still more restrictions. Westerners could not carry arms
or gather in groups larger than ten. There was to be no rowing on the
river or walking within the city walls of Canton. Foreigners could
stroll in the square in front of the factories but could not walk in the
gardens on the opposite shore more than once a year, and then only
in the company of an official translator. The Chinese were forbidden
to teach foreigners their language; all transactions were conducted in
pidgin English.

And all dealing was done through one of thirteen Chinese traders,
who were held personally responsible for the actions of their foreign
associates. This was sometimes a touchy business. Sailors reeling back
to their ships from an evening in Hog Lane, the single narrow street
of grog shops they were permitted to visit on shore leave, occasionally
got into trouble, requiring their Chinese sponsors to pay stiff damages
to the imperial viceroy. But it was worth the inconvenience. Houqua,
the agent who handled business for most American firms, became
probably the wealthiest merchant on earth, said to have compiled a
fortune of some $26 million by the year Warren Delano first came to
know him.

Delano and his fellow traders lived comfortable if cramped lives at
Canton, cut off from the real China that began just a few feet behind
their factories, but generally content. Their quarters, furnished with
chairs and tables and bedsteads brought from home, were two floors
above the guarded godown in which cargoes were stored; in early
spring, when Chinese goods were heaped there awaiting shipment, the
rich smell of spices and tea perfumed their rooms. There were servants
to cook and clean and launder and wait table; each man's desk had a
bell with which to summon a snack or a glass of water.

Algonac 69

Foreign women were forbidden in Canton. Those few traders
whose wives and children had crossed the ocean with them had to be
satisfied with summers together at the family compound in the Por
tuguese colony of Macao, some eighty-five miles down river. But for
those willing to risk trouble with the authorities there were the flower
boats, moored brothels with gilded balconies on which women hob
bled back and forth to emphasize the alluring tininess of their broken
feet.

The square in which the traders were permitted to take the air was
filled daily with a swarm of cobblers, jugglers, fortunetellers, tailors,
musicians and beggars. There were some 1,000 official alms seekers
in Canton, all dues-paying members of the Flower Society of Beggars,
and they included a long file of blind men who made their way into
the factory square each afternoon, roped together, banging the ground
with staves and chanting "Cash, foreign devils, Cash!" When the
clamor grew intolerable, a complaint was registered with the militia
and the square was cleared with whips.

The Chinese took an amused view of the foreigners, and often
turned out in large numbers just to look at them, locked up in their
compound. One of Warren's friends, longing perhaps for wide-open
spaces back home, brought his horse from Macao and doggedly rode
it back and forth across the Canton square every afternoon. The owner
of a shop past which the horse plodded daily improved business by
hanging a sign which said he had "hired zfanqui to ride opposite [my]
house for the diversion from five to six every evening"; those who
wanted to see the sight in comfort were welcome at his tea stall.

The world inside the factories was hearty, profane, profoundly
masculine, and not notably taxing. "Canton was and is and will be
... a most stupid place," Warren once wrote. Only the promise of
profits kept him there, and when his younger brother Edward, just
twenty-two, arrived in 1839, it was Warren's fond hope that Ned
would not have to stay in China as long as he had.

Business picked up with the going and coming of the trading ships
in winter, but the rest of the time there was little to do. Most merchants
spent several months relaxing at Macao. But even at Canton, the trad
ers found that a good many of the emperor's strictures could safely be
ignored, a few coins in the right hands making all the difference.
Though venturing out onto the Pearl River was officially outlawed, for
example, Delano and his friends formed a Canton Regatta that raced
on its muddy waters every spring. In the first annual races in 1837, his

70 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

six-oared gig, The Not So Green, outpulled its British rivals for the cup.

The high points of the Canton social season for the Americans were
the sumptuous banquets held at the home of Houqua on the midriver
island of Honam. Houqua was a thin, fragile, sad-eyed man with a wisp
of gray beard and an air of unfailing kindness. He wore silk brocade
robes and clattering ropes of jade and a silk cap with a bright blue
button that denoted his special status. The bohea tea grown on the
slopes of his family estate and shipped aboard American ships was said
to be among the finest in the world and he was generous toward those
who had made him rich. His trading partners all admired him a
portrait of Houqua always hung in the Delano parlor at Algonac and
once when he was being harshly treated by imperial officials one of his
old American friends wrote to suggest that he might consider moving
to the United States; St. Augustine, Florida, the American thought,
might be just the place to start over.

The move would have required a considerable adjustment. Houqua
lived in splendor on Honam. At noon on banquet days, he dispatched
a fleet of intricately carved houseboats to carry his guests across the
water. His home was a dazzling complex of kiosks and ponds and
pavilions, walled gardens and shrines and a pillared banquet hall, its
marble floor covered with silk, all tended by a silent army of servants.
The first course was served in the early afternoon; the last near dawn
the following morning. Warren Delano and his fellow New England-
ers found themselves seated on japanned chairs, dining on plovers'
eggs, sturgeon's nose, and soup brewed from sea slugs while sipping
green-pea wine from dainty silver cups.

William Hunter, one of Warren's Canton friends, loved the life.
"We pursued the even tenor of our way with supreme indifference,"
he remembered years later, "took care of our business, pulled boats,
walked, dined well and so the years rolled by as happily as possible."

The idyll was abruptly interrupted in 1838. Opium was the cause.
Traffic in the drug was the dirty little secret of the China trade, almost
universally practiced, almost never discussed. And as an increasingly
important Canton trader, Warren Delano was deeply involved in it.

The British controlled the business; perhaps a third of their Chinese
revenues came from the sale of opium, though its importation had been
expressly forbidden by the emperor since 1729. Massive bribery of
local officials made it possible; the drug's compactness and the almost
insatiable demand for it among Chinese addicts made it spectacularly
lucrative.

Algonac 7 1

The Americans did their best to keep up with the British, but never
came close to matching their earnings. Every American firm took part,
with the lone exception of D. W. C. Olyphant and Company, run by
Quakers opposed to selling opium on principle and derided by the
other traders as "Zion's Corner" for their abstemiousness. Warren
once tried to put the business in what he saw as the proper perspective
for his brothers back home. "I do not pretend to justify . . . the opium
trade in a moral and philanthropic point of view," he wrote, "but as
a merchant I insist that it has been . . . fair, honorable and legitimate
. . . liable to no further or weightier objections than is the importation
of Wines, Brandies & Spirits into the U. States." Nor did he deny that
opium had an "unhappy effect" upon the Chinese people, and his
brother Ned, at least, would witness that effect firsthand. In the au
tumn of 1844, on the way to India to arrange to buy the season's supply
of the drug, he had stopped at Singapore and there visited several
licensed dens. "Found smokers in all of them," he noted in his diary.
"One man was prostrate under its effects pale, cadaverous, death-like
. . . for when I took his pipe from his hand he offered no resistance,
though his eyes tried to follow me." Ned continued with his mission,
evidently unperturbed.

Robert Bennet Forbes, Warren's friend and immediate predecessor
as head of Russell and Company in Canton, offered still another justifi
cation for taking part in the trade: the best seafaring families of New
England were involved in it, "those to whom I have always been
accustomed to look up as exponents of all that was honorable in trade
the Perkins's, the Peabodys, the Russells and the Lows." There was
a huge profit to be made. Others were enriching themselves; Warren
Delano and his fellow traders saw no reason not to get their share.
Under Robert Forbes's energetic direction, Russell and Company be
came the third-most important single firm in the opium trade, British
or American. As Forbes's successor as head of the company, Warren
Delano improved upon his performance.

It was a matter of supply, not scruples then, that kept the Ameri
cans from doing even better. The British owned their own poppy
fields in India. Their American competitors had to make do with
opium bought in Turkey, or to sell the Indian drug on consignment
for British or Indian firms.

The mechanics of smuggling were simple. Chinese buyers placed
their orders with a Canton trader and paid for it in hard cash. Incoming
vessels carrying the drug stopped briefly under the lee of Lintin Island
in Canton Bay before proceeding to the official anchorage at Wham-

72 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

poa. Scarlet-painted buyers' boats, called "fast crabs" or ''scrambling
dragons" by the Chinese, scurried out to meet them, propelled by sixty
oarsmen and armed against pirates. An agent of the Canton firm waited
on deck to open the chests, weigh out the fist-sized cakes of the drug,
and repack them in bags made of matting. Some ships carried as many
as 100 chests, each containing one picul or 133 % pounds, enough to
supply 8,000 addicts for a month.

For each chest he processed, the agent received five dollars, plus
more if the buyer had dallied too long in presenting his receipted order.
Robert Forbes handled this chore himself for Russell and Company
and is said to have earned $30,000 in commissions; Warren may have
done the same when his turn came.

The Manchus were powerless to stop it, though they despaired
over opium's impact on their subjects and worried at the drain the
trade made on precious specie. Crackdowns were announced from
time to time, but they were mostly shadow plays staged by local
officials to please the emperor at Peking. Traders and buyers alike
knew that corruption was too widespread for profits permanently to
be affected on either side; Warren himself wrote that if the Chinese
ever seriously attempted to enforce their laws against opium, "the
Foreigners cannot by any possibility sell or smuggle the drug into the
country."

In 1838 the emperor again declared his determination to crush the
opium business, and the viceroy of Canton found it necessary to pla
cate him with a new theatrical gesture. A number of oarsmen from the
buyers' boats were seized and publicly strangled. Ordinary opium
traffic on the river halted briefly, but the flow of profits continued
without a break, the viceroy having quietly chartered his own fleet of
junks to ferry the contraband inland until things quieted down again.

On December 12, however, another staged event got out of hand.
That afternoon traders sitting on the verandas of their factories noticed
a Chinese official being carried into the square in his sedan chair. With
him came a battered prisoner and two executioners. The official got
down, took his seat beneath a hastily erected tent, and ordered that tea
be brought to him while the prisoner was lashed to a wooden cross.
The westerners realized that a man was about to be strangled before
their eyes.

Several hurried out to protest, led by Hunter, the only trader at
Canton who spoke Chinese. The official explained that the criminal
was the operator of an opium den and had been dragged into the square

Algonac 73

to die as an object lesson to all the barbarians who had dared to supply
him. Hunter said this was an intolerable insult. There matters stood
for a few minutes, the prisoner and his executioners waiting patiently
as his fate was argued back and forth. Then a band of British sailors
who had just stepped ashore on leave took matters into their own
hands. They smashed the cross and used the fragments to beat back the
executioners. A small riot began, growing larger fast as the westerners,
perhaps 100 strong and possibly including Warren Delano, poured
into the square, only to be driven back inside by an expanding mob
of angry Cantonese.

Soon some 8,000 Chinese had besieged the factories, hurling rocks
and battering at the doors. Warren and his friends helped barricade the
back entrances with canisters of coal, and they scattered broken glass
out the front windows to make an all-out assault as painful as possible
to the barefooted mob. When things seemed darkest, Houqua came to
the rescue, persuading the authorities to send in the militia. Russell and
Company resolved to withdraw from the opium business, at least for
the time being.

There things might have ended had a new imperial high commis
sioner not just been appointed with orders to stop the smuggling. His
name was Lin Tse-hsu, and he was incorruptible. As governor general
of Hukwang he had eradicated the narcotics problem in his province
by the simple expedient of executing every smoker who refused to turn
in his pipe.

He arrived at Canton in March of 1839, surrounded the factories
with troops, and declared that the barbarians would stay inside until
they turned over to him for destruction all the opium in and around
Canton, and further pledged not to import more on pain of the "ex
treme rigor of the law" decapitation. Armed junks patrolled the
waterfront to bar foreign reinforcements, all Chinese servants were
withdrawn and food supplies were cut off, though the resourceful
Houqua managed to smuggle in pigs, sheep, and chickens when
needed. The entire merchant community was held hostage for opium.

Captain Charles Elliot, the British trade superintendent, tried to
negotiate, but he was in a poor position to bargain, and Lin refused
to budge. Meanwhile, the imprisoned traders struggled to maintain
their morale. They held rat hunts and cricket matches and contests to
see who could shinny highest up a flagpole. The Russell men enjoyed
roughing it. "We laughed rather than groaned over the efforts to roast
a capon, to boil an egg," William Hunter remembered. "We could all

74 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

clean knives, sweep the floors, even manage the lamps." They were less
capable in the kitchen, where, one of them admitted, "no white man
had ever been before," and Warren was eventually elected chief cook,
displacing Robert Forbes, who had blistered the toast and served ham
and eggs which even he confessed "bore the color and consistency of
dirty sole leather."

Elliot was finally forced to capitulate, surrendering 20,280 chests
of opium to the Chinese. The men of Russell and Company gave up
an additional 1,540 chests, which they had been holding on consign
ment for others. All of it was ceremoniously dissolved in water, further
diluted with salt and lime, then sluiced into the harbor, after it was
suggested to the spirits of the sea that they get out of the way of this
unavoidable desecration. It took 500 workmen to finish the job, and
when one man tried to save a morsel for himself he was beheaded on
the spot.

The British traders then withdrew from Canton first to Macao
and then onto their anchored ships waiting for London to dispatch
an expeditionary force to punish the Chinese. It arrived in June of 1840
and the Opium War that followed, bloody but sporadic, lasted nearly
three years.

During that time the Americans continued to trade at Canton, and
Warren Delano was never busier. As senior American merchant, he
served as vice consul, oversaw the Russell accounts, and also acted as
agent for the absent British. Profits soared and opium continued to be
carried inland, 8,000 chests of it in 1839 alone.

Americans were not directly involved in the fighting, and Warren
and Ned were ambivalent as to who they hoped would win. They
sympathized with the Chinese for wishing to defend their homeland,
especially when rumors reached them of atrocities, including wide
spread rape, committed by British sailors ashore. "I truly wish that
John Bull would meet with one hearty repulse," Ned wrote, "for why
should he enter their peaceful habitations and commit the horridest
brutalities upon the women?" On the other hand, official Chinese
hauteur had angered the Americans just as much as it had the British.
"Great Britain owes it to herself and to the civilized world (in the
West)," Warren wrote early in the conflict, "to knock a little reason
into this besotted people and teach them to treat strangers with com
mon decency."

Still, if they were not combatants, the war came very close to the
Delano brothers. Shortly after the British "fleet arrived, it imposed a

Algonac 75

blockade on Chinese shipping at Canton. The Chinese reciprocated
with a counterblockade of their own. Only hours before it was to go
into effect, a British ship, the 900-ton Cambridge, slipped into Wham-
poa from Singapore. After she was unloaded, her captain, seeing no
way to return safely to sea, sold her cheap to Warren. He renamed her
the Chesapeake, but before she could enter Russell's service, Commis
sioner Lin himself asked to buy her. Delano was in no position to
argue, and she was sold to the Chinese navy in fact she was the
Chinese navy, except for a handful of junks hastily fitted out for battle.
The Celestial Empire had never seen much need for sea power.

The ship was towed to the mouth of the river. Her prow was
painted with crimson dragon's eyes, bright streamers emblazoned with
the Chinese characters for "courage" flew from her masts, and her
decks were lined with every imaginable sort and size of cannon, each
conveniently surrounded with its own casks of gunpowder. A crew of
400 men lived aboard.

The blockade stayed in effect for seven months while skirmishes
were fought elsewhere at sea and intermittent talks yielded no conces
sions on either side. British patience eventually wore thin. Two an
cient fortresses guarded the mouth of the Canton River. On January
7, 1841, at 9:30 A.M., warships moved in on both citadels simultane
ously. Five hundred Chinese died in the bombardment. Not one Brit
ish sailor was seriously injured. The British now anchored. Three
smaller forts were all that stood between them and Canton itself. They
could be taken any time the talks broke down.

Ned and a friend were rowed out to one of the ruined forts the next
day. "What horrid butchery!" he wrote, and described "the burned
body of a Chinaman. Some sailors had put a bamboo in his mouth
surmounted by a Chinese scroll."

A few days later, the Delanos were returning to Canton aboard a
dispatch boat after a brief visit to Macao. Identifying themselves as
Americans they were allowed to pass among the tall British warships
that now filled the river's mouth, even though they carried an arsenal
of weapons in plain view on deck swords, two double-barreled shot
guns, two single-shot pistols, and a brace of Colts, each with five
revolving barrels. These offered protection against pirates, but also
allowed the brothers to take a shot from time to time at the ducks that
sometimes lighted among the river islands.

Their boatmen acted as loaders and later in the day, while one of
the shotguns was being put back onto the deck, it went off. Two

76 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Chinese collapsed, streaming blood. One died within five minutes, his
face, neck, and chest riddled with buckshot; the other was slightly
wounded in the scalp. Their angry companions refused to row further
until every weapon aboard was emptied into the water. That done, the
dead man and his groaning companion were carried below and the
boat continued on toward the factories. The accident, Ned wrote, had
the effect of "saddening our hearts and therefore our dinner was not
eaten with that good relish with which it ordinarily is."

Word of the incident reached Canton ahead of the dispatch boat,
and the dead man's family rowed out to meet them just offshore. When
the widow saw her husband's bloody corpse, Ned wrote, she "set up
an ugly howling and wailing." Warren offered her $ 1 50 "in charity,"
Ned said but she was not content with that and "after humbugging
for two or three hours, she accepted $200" to keep quiet about what
had happened. Ned thought Warren had been too generous; after all,
the dead boatman had been happy to work for $1.50 a month when
he was alive. Later, when an excited trader whispered to Ned that he
had heard a rumor that foreigners had shot two Chinese somewhere
on the river, Ned assured him "it is all nonsense."

On February 2, the British paddle steamer Nemesis approached the
refitted Chesapeake which Warren had sold to Lin a year and a half
earlier and which now floated empty at anchor, its crew having fled.
A single Congreve rocket arced across the water and landed among the
powder barrels on deck. The ship disintegrated with an explosion so
daunting that Ned saw its "sudden and brilliant light" from the factory
twelve miles away.

Exactly one month later, on March 2, a British assault on the city
itself seemed imminent and the Prefect of Canton begged Warren as
the senior foreigner left in the factories to go to Whampoa and inter
cede on behalf of the Chinese. Warren refused to take sides, but agreed
to do what he could as a neutral party. The British commander was
cordial but unyielding.

In a letter to his brother Joseph back home, Warren told what
happened to him on his way back to Canton on the eighteenth. The
"cowardly Chinese let go a shot at my boat," he said, "which passed
some thirty feet over our heads, two men jumped overboard, two or
three threw themselves in the bottom of the boat, and roared like
squalling babies." (The ancient cannon in the Chinese forts were rarely
accurate, since they could not be made to swivel; to hit something,
Chinese gunners had to wait till it slid into view, then hope it stayed
there until the charge could be touched off.)

Algonac 77

His boat now floating helplessly, Warren was towed ashore. Chi
nese troops marched him three-quarters of a mile into the city "to the
wondrous astonishment, admiration and gratification of the gaping
multitude, the gallant soldiers informing those we passed of the terrible
conflict which had taken place." He was brought before "His Excel
lency, the Commissioner Yang, a decrepit looking man at the age of
74 years, with bleared eyes and deaf as a haddock." The old official
inspected his clothing, "took my hands, examining them carefully and
smelling them, asked me to unbutton my shirt-bosom and show him
my hide, which I did, and then pronounced me a good man, an
excellent man, one of the best he had ever known, and seizing a lousy
ragged dirty soldier who stood within three inches of His Excellency,
said I was 'all the same as he.' "

Warren got back to the factory in time to watch from the roof as
the British shelled the last three Chinese forts, then headed toward
shore. A few shells were lobbed over the factories and into the city
before the longboats landed, driving the other traders to take cover.
Warren Delano alone stayed on the roof to watch. 3

Opium helped make Warren a wealthy man. Neither he nor his
descendants were proud of that fact. He kept his business affairs to
himself. Years later, one of his sons remembered u how strictly he
complied with the admonition not to let his right hand know what his
left hand was doing." In a family fond of retelling and embellishing
even the mildest sort of ancestral adventures, no stories seem to have
been handed down concerning Warren Delano's genuinely adventur
ous career in the opium business.

In 1879, thirty-three years after he left Canton, when both he and
Robert Bennet Forbes were old and important men with fortunes
hoarded from a dozen other industries, Forbes wrote his old partner
asking him to write down all that he remembered of his early years in
China. Forbes was requesting each of the old Russell partners to do the
same some 100 men in all and hoped to compile a detailed and
anecdotal history from their collective reminiscences. Warren re
sponded with a brief and colorless outline of his Canton career without
mentioning his part in the drug traffic. Other former partners were still
less cooperative. One worried that any account based on the fading
memories of old men would exaggerate the parts played by some

3. The Chinese were never a match for Britain, and when the war ended in the summer
of 1842, the emperor was forced to open five new trading ports and cede Hong Kong to the
foreigners. Opium was not mentioned in the Treaty of Nanking, but Hong Kong provided a
convenient new storage and distribution center for the trade.

78 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

partners and ignore those of others. Several old Russell men wanted
no part of any history. Such a book would be "intrusive," one wrote.

Even Robert Forbes began to have second thoughts. "The only
thing I fear," he told Warren, "is that in giving a sketch of the causes
and effects of the opium traffic and our imprisonment I may say too
much."

Forbes's projected history of Russell and Company was never pub
lished. 4

In January of 1843, Warren Delano set sail for New York. He had
been in China for nine years and had built his fortune. Home leave was
long overdue. He arrived in the spring, visited his family at Fairhaven,
and then took his two sisters on a long slow carriage ride through
Massachusetts. At the home of his Canton friend John Murray Forbes
at Northampton he met a Forbes cousin, Judge Joseph Lyman, who
invited the Delanos to his home that evening.

The Lymans, too, were members of a distinguished old Massachu
setts family, not wealthy but intellectually rich. Northampton was
smaller then, and mostly made up of farmers who looked upon the
Lymans fondly but with something approaching awe. They owned the
town's first piano and taught their children to play it, and they ordered
the latest books from Boston and read them aloud to one another in
the evenings. Eminent men and women often stayed with them. The
judge was an influential Federalist and Whig whose friends included
John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. His second wife was Anne
Jean Robbins, also of strong Yankee stock.

They were an unfailingly gracious couple, but formidable. Their
friend Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he had never seen "so stately
and naturally distinguished a pair." Mrs. Lyman was especially impres
sive, "a queenly woman, nobly formed . . . made for society, with
flowing conversation, high spirits and perfectly at ease." The Lymans
often had distinguished guests, Emerson remembered sometimes
twenty of them at a time for breakfast but "none came or could come
. . . who surpassed the dignity and intelligence of the hosts."

4. Robert Forbes did append a terse chronicle of the firm, including a list of its early partners
and their terms of service, to the later editions of his Personal Reminiscenes. But it is skeletal and
bloodless, not at all what he originally had in mind. The Russell men's responses to his question
naire are filed among his papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, Massachusetts.

It is interesting that when writing his brief memoir of life at Canton, Warren Delano left
out his own involvement with opium entirely, but went out of his way in a footnote to absolve
Houqua of ever having owned a chest of the drug.

Source: Delano Family Papers (hereafter DFP), FDRL,

Algonac 79

It was not the judge and his wife who interested Warren that
evening, however. It was their youngest daughter Catherine Robbins
Lyman, just eighteen, dark-eyed, cultured, shy, and good-humored.
He was newly rich and at thirty-three ready to start a family.

We know little of their courtship except that it was brief. Warren
was committed to return to Canton before the first of the year. Cather
ine's parents liked him. "We have from the first been delighted by
him," Mrs. Lyman wrote. "He has such a composed and dignified air
for a man of business, such a quiet and sensible mode of expressing his
rational opinions, that . . . there can be nothing but pleasure in his
society."

The difference in their ages was no barrier to marriage. Catherine
was accustomed to living in a patriarchal household. Her father was
twenty-one years older than his wife, who reverently called him
"Judge Lyman" even at home. His opinions became hers. Mrs. Lyman
never contradicted him, Catherine's sister once wrote, and was the
ruler only of "the kingdom of her own mind."

Catherine had evidently modeled herself after her mother. She, too,
was kind and deferential, "lovely in her character," her mother wrote,
"never out of temper, and always ready to oblige to any extent that her
friends can claim." Her readiness to oblige would be tested many times
during her marriage; it was never found wanting.

Her engagement to Warren Delano was announced in midsummer
and they were married at Northampton on November 1. On Decem
ber 4, the newlyweds sailed for China aboard John Bennet Forbes's
sleek new Paul Jones. With them went Warren's younger sister Debo
rah. The voyage was calm and relatively brief just 104 days. The Paul
Jones was the first ship in the China trade to have its own ice house
aboard, and according to its proud builder, the Delanos became "the
first Americans ever to eat canvas-back ducks and mutton off the Cape
of Good Hope." They had enough ice left over at Canton to present
chunks of it along with crisp New England apples to Ned as gifts.

Catherine Delano had not wanted to go to China. It seemed im
possibly remote. "I feel it is my duty to go," she told a friend, yet "it
seems almost dangerous to undertake such a thing. ... I hope I shall
have the courage to the last." But she liked Macao when she got there.
The harbor and its hillside covered by white houses with white shut
ters reminded her of Nahant, she said, and Arrowdale, her husband's
big house on the fashionable Ridge was magnificent. "I am the happiest

80 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

person living," she wrote home to Northampton shortly after she had
settled in.

The Delanos stayed in China for three years. Warren continued to
run Russell and Company, increasing both its profits and his own with
each successive season. Their domestic life was more difficult. Arrow-
dale burned, taking all their possessions with it. They lived in the
Canton factory after that. Some restrictions on barbarians had been
lifted and they were even legally permitted to visit the old city of
Canton itself. Popular feeling against the Fan Kuei still ran high after
the Opium War, however, and Warren insisted Catherine stay within
the compound. She acquiesced, though she admitted to her mother
that it sometimes made her feel like a prisoner.

A baby girl was born in 1844 and named Susan. She died before
her second birthday, in the spring of 1846; her body was eventually
brought home to Fairhaven for burial. For a time after the infant's
death, Warren feared for Catherine's sanity; she had been "queer" ever
since the tragedy, he told Ned that summer, and he was afraid she
might kill herself in her grief. She seems to have steeled herself after
a second daughter, Louise, was born later that same year; the baby fell
ill, recovered, but was always frail.

Toward the end of 1846 the Delanos returned to America to stay.
Warren threw himself into business with what one friend called "his
accustomed vigor and ... great force," investing his new fortune in
a host of likely ventures New York waterfront property, railroads,
copper mines in Tennessee and Maryland, land and anthracite coal in
Pennsylvania, where a mining town was named Delano in his honor.
He never entirely abandoned the China trade, building and owning
several clippers, and when gold was discovered in California it pro
vided him with a whole new market for his cargoes. His ship, the Mint,
built with Robert Forbes and the Swedish engineer John Ericsson, was
the first American paddle steamer on the Sacramento River.

Both Warren and Catherine had been raised in small New England
villages in homes that were comfortable but not opulent. Their new
and growing wealth now dictated a style of living altogether novel and
enticing. They first bought themselves a five-story Manhattan town
house at 39 Lafayette Square, one of nine unusual Greek Revival
dwellings designed by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis.
These were called "Colonnade Row" because all nine were linked
together by a common porch and a cornice supported by twenty-eight
lofty Corinthian columns. The house itself was grand, inside and out,

Algonac 8 1

with marble mantelpieces, coffered plaster ceilings and massive doors
of mahogany hung on silver-plated hinges.

So was the address. Their neighbors included the writer Washing
ton Irving; John Jacob Astor, now nearing eighty-four but still the
wealthiest man in America; and Warren's younger brother Franklin,
who had married Mr. Astor's granddaughter Laura Astor just two
years earlier. He too had been in the shipping business but had recently
"retired" at thirty-one to live off his wife's immense trust fund. While
Warren had had to buy his house, Franklin's had been free, a token
of the old man's fondness for his granddaughter. William Backhouse
Astor, Laura Delano's father, lived just across the street. He had also
been generous to the young couple, giving them as a wedding present
a handsome country seat at Barrytown, twenty miles north of Hyde
Park. It was an old Dutch farm called "Steen Valetje" and adjoined his
own sprawling estate, Rokeby.

Warren Delano wanted a country place, too. He now had a city
house but as one of his children wrote, "he looked forward to a borne
in the country." Back in 1825, when he had been a boy of sixteen, his
father had sailed with him up the Hudson to Albany to witness the
impressive ceremonies that inaugurated the Erie Canal. But it was the
scenery, not the celebration, that had remained with him, the gleaming
span of the river and the imposing houses of the wealthy that could
be glimpsed through the trees along its high banks. He had promised
himself then that he would someday live in one of them himself.

For three summers the Delanos rented an enormous granite Greek
Revival house at Danskammer Point, a rocky promontory that jutted
far out from the river's west bank, six miles north of Newburgh. Three
more children were born during these years: Deborah (known always
as Dora) in 1847; Annie in 1849; and in 1850, Warren III (who died
in infancy).

Meanwhile, Warren searched for a place of his own to buy. In 1851,
he found it four miles downriver, a sixty-acre fruit farm with a modest
brick and stucco house and handsome views of the river and the
Hudson Highlands. He named it "Algonac."

More than half a century later, on June 15, 1905, Sara Delano
Roosevelt received a cable from her son Franklin and his new bride,
Eleanor, who had sailed for England on their honeymoon aboard the
RMS Oceanic, eight days earlier. The telegram was datelined Liver
pool, the newlyweds' landing place.

82 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Its message consisted of a single word: "Algonac."

Mrs. Roosevelt knew instantly that all was well Algonac was a
code word within the family for good news; for everything that made
one feel safe, tranquil, protected.

That had been her father's intention. To an extraordinary degree
he sought to keep his growing family from unpleasantness of any kind.
Algonac's setting high above the river provided a natural sanctuary,
and the architect and landscape gardener whom he hired to improve
his new house and grounds shared fully his love for at least the illusion
of isolation.

Andrew Jackson Downing, just thirty-six, was already one of the
best-known builders in America. A slim, dark-eyed romantic, steeped
in the Gothic novels of Sir Walter Scott, he had written several hugely
influential books on "rural architecture," urging an end to the Classic
revival which he derided as "the Greek temple disease" in favor of
a pseudo-Gothic style he thought better suited to American ideals and
atmosphere.

When Warren Delano approached Downing, the architect was
busily laying out the grounds for the U.S. Capitol, the White House,
and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington at the personal invita
tion of President Fillmore. He found the time for Algonac, nonethe
less; he was a local boy, the son of a Newburgh nurseryman, with a
special fondness for designing fine houses in his native valley. When
he planned a home on the river, he once wrote, he tried always to
achieve that "accessible perfect seclusion" which is "one of the most
captivating features in the life of the country gentleman whose lot is
cast on the banks of the Hudson." It was his aim always that when one
of his houses was completed and stood surrounded by suitable gardens
at once beautiful and picturesque, "one might fancy himself one thou
sand miles from all the crowded and busy haunts of men."

Downing designed three kinds of rural homes: farmhouses for
those who actually worked the soil; cottages meant for gentlemen of
modest means (those whose households required no more than two
domestics); and villas, or country houses, "requiring the care of at least
three . . . servants."

Algonac was emphatically a villa. 5 It was to have a permanent staff
of ten, with additional temporary help hired as needed. Downing

5. Downing's English-born collaborator, Calvert Vaux, did a lovely watercolor rendering
of Algonac as it would look when redesigned; it is now on display in the Dutchess County Room
of the FDR Library.

Algonac 83

greatly enlarged the existing house, facing it south instead of east to
take full advantage of its view of the broad busy stretch of the river
known as Newburgh Bay. He added the big square tower and deep
verandas, and designed a compatible gatehouse along with barns and
greenhouses, and stables with arched windows and brick courtyards,
across which Warren Delano's horses came and went with a pleasing
clatter.

Because the Delanos wanted to be able to make their home at
Algonac the year round, trees and shrubs suitable to each season were
planted throughout the grounds, a rich profusion of evergreens for
winter, selected maples, elms, beeches, locusts, oaks, and flowering
species from China for the warmer months. At Downing's instruction,
the shady green lawn that sloped down toward the river was mown
"into a softness like velvet." 6

Downing was a moralist as well as an architect and gardener,
believing that it was to houses such as those he designed "that we
should look for the happiest social and moral progress of our people."
But he was not doctrinaire, and he did not believe in ostentation.
"There is ... something wonderfully captivating in the idea of a
battlemented castle," he warned in his The Architecture of Country
Houses, "even to an apparently modest man who thus shows to the
world his unsuspected vein of personal ambition by trying to make a
castle of his country house. But unless there is something of the castle in
the man it is very likely, if it be a real castle, to dwarf him to the stature
of a mouse."

Warren Delano was never dwarfed. His great energy made Al
gonac go. The big high-ceilinged rooms were crowded with evidence
of his enthusiasms. The entrance hall was hung with armor and paint
ings he had brought back from China. Pieces of fine porcelain and
curiously carved jade were displayed behind glass cabinet doors and
along the mantel. Guests left their hats and shawls on a round Chinese
marble-topped table at the foot of the sweeping central staircase. Even
the Delanos' bedstead was Chinese and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

6. Algonac was one of Downing's last projects. On July 28 of the following year he boarded
the steamboat Henry Clay on his way to New York. He did not know that over the protests of
her passengers her captain was racing a rival steamer, the Armenia. Off the New Jersey Palisades
a boiler overheated and her canvas cover caught fire. Within moments the boat was in flames.
Downing was last seen alive at the rail, urging calm and tossing deck chairs down to passengers
floundering in the water. His body was not found until the next morning. Some sixty persons
died, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister Louisa and Mrs. Bartlett, the wife of James
Roosevelt's old Poughkeepsie schoolmaster.

84 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

The family Warren, Catherine, and their three children moved
to Algonac in 1852. With them came several servants and two unmar
ried relatives, Warren's sister Sarah and his brother Ned, now home
from China and without much initiative of his own. Later that year,
another boy was born and given his dead brother's name, Warren III.

And there, two years later, on September 21, 1854, Sara Delano
was born. She was the seventh child (and the fifth to live); there would
be four more before she reached her teens. She was named for her
resident aunt. There had been talk of giving her a middle name, Phi-
lippa, in honor of her ancestor Philippe de la Noye, and her grandfa
ther Delano was relieved when her parents thought better of it. "Plane
Sarah," he wrote, "is decidedly better." The final u h" was dropped
from her name, too, so that she and her aunt could be told apart in
family correspondence, and when there was still confusion she became
Sallie. (Obeisance to the founder of the American Delanos would be
paid in 1857, when a second son was named Philippe.)

Algonac was a sunny, loving place in which to grow. Sara tottered
after her older sisters and brother, watched them climb the apple trees
she would soon climb herself, grew "more cunning every day," ac
cording to her eight-year-old sister Dora.

Her mother was warm and sympathetic, devoted to her children,
tirelessly willing to read aloud to them from improving works. She was
"very angelic," Sara once said, "almost too good, and never could deny
us anything. And she never disciplined anything in her life!"

She worshipped her husband, just as her mother had worshipped
her father, and was unwilling ever to seem to make the simplest deci
sion without consulting him. And she taught her children to revere
him, too.

Her husband was "a dominant character," one of his sons wrote,
accustomed to planning the lives of everyone around him. The serv
ants did his bidding and those who did not meet his standards were
quickly replaced. And the other adults in the family also relied upon
him Ned, Aunt Sarah, and Nancy Church, his unmarried cousin
known to all as "Nannie," who came to Algonac to stay in 1860.

Warren Delano's authority was loving but absolute. He rarely
spanked his children. Even in her old age, Sara was proud that he had
never spanked her. The children were expected to keep a respectful
quiet when he was home. "We were not afraid of him," Sara remem
bered, "but if we were quarreling or doing something we shouldn't in

Algonac 85

the room in which he was writing, he would say 'What's that? Tut,
Tut,' and we would immediately stop."

Bad news was never discussed in front of the children. Looking
back, Sara marveled at the way her parents "carefully kept away
... all traces of sadness or trouble or the news of anything alarming."
Their lives were "tranquil," she said, "unmarked by adult emotions."

No one was to complain. When one of the children grumbled
about the weather one rainy day, their father said, "Nonsense. All
weather is good weather." And no one was ever to be alarmed, a lesson
Sara learned early. At four she fell against the sharp corner of a cabinet
in the drawing room, deeply cutting her scalp. Bleeding and fright
ened, she ran to her father. He washed the gash and then, fearing that
there would be a scar if he waited for the doctor to ride out from
Newburgh, he told her to be brave, gripped her between his knees to
keep her from squirming, and sewed the wound shut himself, using a
needle and fine thread. The pain was excruciating, but Sara never
moved or cried out. It was wrong to worry others.

It sometimes seemed as if Algonac was its own peaceful country.
Warren Delano was its chronicler as well as its creator. He and his wife
took the time nearly every evening of their long lives together to note
in near-obsessive detail everything that had happened that day within
their realm. They left almost nothing out. The pages of the Algonac
diaries, thousands of them, include the names of callers who came to
the door; what everyone gave everyone else for Christmas; the symp
toms and progress of every illness large or small suffered by family
members or the servants; the butchering of every pig and the arrival
of every kitten born in the barn. Precise temperatures were recorded,
morning and night. There were meticulous lists of all that was bought
or planted or picked; notes on the appearance of the first asparagus and
katydid, interspersed with newspaper clippings that had provoked
discussion over dinner. And there were other clippings, too, news
stories of floods and fires and drownings, the death notices of far-off
friends and relatives reports of the dreadful things that happened to
those unfortunate enough to live beyond Algonac's borders.

Nothing that affected a Delano was unimportant.

The Lymans had been a close, cohesive family, but the fierce sense
of unity fostered by Warren Delano seems to have been a legacy of his
father, Warren the First, whose clannishness approached xenophobia.

86 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

When Sara and the other grandchildren went to visit him at Fairhaven
as they did nearly every summer, they took the Fall River Line
steamer, carrying a picnic hamper so as not to have to eat restaurant
food, and traveling on the night boat to avoid having to stay in a hotel.
"It would never have occurred to our parents to take us to a hotel in
this country," Sara once said.

A servant met them at the dock and drove them and their trunks
and carpetbags to the family home, where their grandfather waited on
the steps. The old captain was an imposing figure in a black frock coat,
leaning on a gold-handled cane. His son Ned had once called him
"impregnable." He was tall, massive, jut-jawed, and utterly bald except
on public occasions when he insisted on wearing a tousled and unper-
suasive black toupee to which no one in the family dared object. His
wife, short and fat in a white lace cape and black silk dress, stood next
to him. She was his second wife, sour and sensitive to slights and
heartily disliked by all her husband's children, who never called her
anything but "Mrs. Delano." The grandchildren called her Grand-
mama, anyway.

She greeted her guests, then gave orders to her butler that every
piece of baggage was to be opened in the back yard and each article
of clothing taken out, unfolded, and thoroughly shaken because, Sara
remembered, "she never knew otherwise what might be brought into
the house."

The homestead was enormous and filled with mementos of its
owner's career at sea. A high stone wall enclosed it, and tall oaks
shaded the lawn, "magnificent trees," said a local reporter, "which
seem to belong to an ancient family." The Delano coat of arms hung
above the door, and Sara and her brothers and sisters would come to
think of Fairhaven as "a family shrine" all of their lives.

It stood on a shady village street along which other children lived.
This was a great novelty for the young Delanos, raised in the country
in the midst of their secluded estate, but they were not expected to
make friends. Sometimes as a special treat they were allowed to walk
unaccompanied to the post office, a block and a half away. "It was the
most exciting thing we did," Sara recalled at eighty. "I still have a thrill
when I go there."

On sunny afternoons they went bathing not swimming in the
quiet water near their grandfather's wharf, changing into their bathing
costumes in one of his warehouses, "just our family."

Algonac 87

In later years, a friend asked Sara why she thought she and her
brothers and sisters had been so scrupulously kept apart from other
children. She wasn't sure. She guessed that "grandpapa was rather
hoity toity ... he had a large family and lived for himself and for them."
No one else mattered very much; no one else was needed.

His son, Sara's father, felt that way, too. He had "the patriarchal
spirit," Sara said, "he cared little for outsiders, but would do anything
for his own family."

Her sister Dora once put it in more positive terms. The Delanos
of Algonac were "a united family," she said. She had seen other fami
lies whose members seemed to care more for other people than for their
own, but "as I look back we always cared most for each other."

In the late summer of 1857, Algonac was nearly destroyed by an
intrusion from the outside world which even Warren Delano could
not keep out. Panic hit Wall Street, sparked by the abrupt failure of
the giant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, but further fueled
by the legacy of years of wild overspeculation in railroads and real
estate. Market prices were halved overnight; specie payment was sus
pended for a time; thousands of businesses closed over the next three
years; hundreds of thousands of men were thrown out of work.

One by one, Warren Delano's investments soured. Unlike James
Roosevelt, who would ride out a similar crash sixteen years later, he
had spread his fortune far too thin. For two anxious, sobering years he
slid steadily toward financial ruin. He cut back spending, sold off his
town house on Colonnade Row, even tried to sell Algonac but could
find no one able to meet his price. All of this was kept in the privacy
of the Delano bedroom or discussed with relations in the parlor after
Sara and the other children were safely in bed. They knew only that
their parents sometimes seemed tense.

In January 1860, Warren Delano was fifty and faced with bank
ruptcy after thirty years in business. He resolved at last to return to
China, to Hong Kong this time, and re-enter the trade which had made
him so rich so fast when he was young tea and opium. 7

7. The Roosevelt and Delano families were silent about the sources of Warren Delano's
fortune. The word "opium" does not once appear in Gracious Lady, Rita Halle Kleeman's
semi-official biography of Sara Delano Roosevelt.

During World War II, Westbrook Pegler wrote at least three columns excoriating FDR as
a hypocrite for accusing others of living off ill-gotten gains when the activities of his own
grandfather Delano "an old buccaneer" had allowed him and his wife to enjoy "to the utmost

88 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Warren's sudden decision appalled Ned, who would have to fend
for himself while Warren was away. "It seems the height of folly," he
wrote to his brother John, "to abandon so much that is beautiful and
attractive for the monotonous life on the 'ocean wave' to be followed

. . . luxury and riches derived from the degradation and wretchedness of the Chinese people.
. . . Certainly with their special interest in the family history [the President and Mrs. Roosevelt]
must have come upon the evidence long ago that they were living richly on the profits of a slave
traffic as horrible and degrading as prostitution."

The White House did not respond, but Daniel W. Delano, the distant but admiring relative
who wrote Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence, was indignant. "This charge has no
foundation in fact," he wrote. "[Warren] Delano's opium dealings were legitimate and no records
exist of any transaction that, by the widest stretch of the imagination, could be construed as
lacking in honesty." Mr. Delano's motives in dealing in opium during the Civil War through
"legitimate trade channels" were patriotic: he was working to obtain "huge cargoes of the
much-needed drug" for the care of the Union wounded at the front. To believe that Warren
Delano's drug dealing was illegitimate, Daniel continued, "would be to dishonor the memory
of President Abraham Lincoln and his integrity. . . . President Lincoln, knowing Mr. Delano
personally and having a high regard and the utmost respect for him, appointed him his special
agent in China. . . . While serving in this capacity, Mr. Delano brought back to America the first
treaties we had with that country."

This defense has itself little foundation in fact:

1. It entirely ignores Warren Delano's participation in the opium business during his first
sojourn in China (1833-1846), when his devotion to the Union was clearly irrelevant.

2. The importation of opium was never legal in Chinese eyes; its "trade channels" were
never "legitimate."

3. While Warren Delano may have helped obtain the drug for the War Department during
the Civil War presumably at a profit the major market for opium even then remained what
it had always been: the craving of hundreds of thousands of Chinese addicts.

4. We do not know whether Lincoln knew Warren Delano, or even knew of him. Daniel
Delano offers no evidence that he did. Nor is there any trace of a link between the two men
among the voluminous Delano papers at the FDRL, and it seems unlikely that a family so
history-conscious would have mislaid the proof if there had ever been any. Nor is there docu
mentary evidence that Warren Delano was ever Mr. Lincoln's "special agent" in China. He
was U.S. consul at Hong Kong for a time, a post that went automatically to the most senior
American merchant on the island; he had held it for the same reason at Canton during the
1840s.

5. Finally, the first U.S. treaty with China was the Treaty of Wang Hsia, signed at the end
of the Opium War in 1 844 and carried home by the man who negotiated it, Caleb Gushing.

Precisely what Warren Delano's children thought privately of their father's career in the
opium trade may never be known. But there may be one suggestive clue. Perhaps in part as
expiation, his youngest son, Fred, volunteered to serve in 1927 as a member of a three-man League
of Nations commission that investigated the drug traffic in Persia (now Iran); the poet Archibald
MacLeish served as his assistant. The commission urged that a railroad be built to allow commodi
ties other than opium to be hauled out of the mountains to the ocean. The Trans-Iranian railroad
was the result, 865 miles of twisting, climbing track that linked the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea.
Even before it was completed, the Shah Riza Pahlavi had ordered himself a private parlor car with
fittings of rosewood, silver, and gold. The opium flow never even slowed.

There is no record anywhere of what FDR knew or suspected about his grandfather's career,
but Eleanor Roosevelt was evidently privately bothered by Pegler's charges. When she visited
Hong Kong in 1953 she talked them over with a knowledgeable British merchant and reluctantly
concluded that "the Delanos and Forbeses, like everybody else, had to include a limited amount
of opium in their cargoes to do any trading at all."

Sources: Frederic A. Delano (hereafter FAD) Papers, FDRL; Time magazine, January 3,
1938; Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own, page 131.

Algonac 89

by an enervating existence on a barren island on the coast of China
and that, too, under British rule!"

It must have deeply troubled Catherine, too, now pregnant for the
ninth time. Somehow she who had always deferred to her husband
would have to run Algonac without him. She would manage. When
there was no man upon whom to lean she always found within herself
the will to go on. Years later one of her sons would write that her
example had taught him that "firmness of character is often disguised
by gentleness, yielding upon [nonessentials] and only asserting itself
when conditions demand a firm attitude."

Sara would learn that lesson as well. So, eventually, would her son,
Franklin.

For her, however, then just five, her father's sudden departure was
terrifying and inexplicable. Without warning, the center of her fam
ily's life, the big capable man whose love and attention mattered most
to her, had simply vanished.

All she could know was that he had gone to a place unimaginably
far away, and that no one could tell her when he would come back.
For the rest of her long life she would suffer from an exaggerated fear
of being apart from those she loved.

The family was separated for three years. Her mother did her best
to keep the children cheerful. Uncle Ned and Aunt Sarah and Cousin
Nannie all helped. But Catherine must often have been distracted by
her loneliness (however skillfully disguised), by the noisy demands of
little Philippe, and by those of the still-newer baby, Catherine or
"Cassie," born that first spring.

School occupied some of Sara's time. She was now old enough to
join the older children in the made-over breakfast room where Cousin
Nannie taught them their lessons while they sat on straight-backed
chairs to improve their posture. So did dancing lessons at a nearby
estate. And when the Civil War began she joined the women of the
house in sewing clothes for the soldiers at the front, and was very
proud when she sent off her first muslin shirt with its sewn-in label,
"This shirt was made by a seven-year-old girl."

But Sara grew solemn nonetheless, introspective, quiet. She was
not to worry others. But there was at least one vivid clue to how she
felt. When her father's letters arrived from China and after her mother
had read them aloud to the family, Sara carefully soaked off the stamps
and saved them. Each one offered fragile, brightly colored proof that
he still existed somewhere, that he still cared.

90 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

When she was an elderly woman, Sara Delano Roosevelt spent
much of her time at Springwood sitting in a tiny densely furnished
room just off the big entrance hall. She called it her "snuggery," and
from it, surrounded by numberless mementos of her crowded life, she
could keep an eye on everyone who came and went from her house.
Always near at hand was a small oval tintype of her father, made not
long before he returned to China. In it Warren and five-year-old Sara
are sitting on his lap. Sara's head rests on her father's shoulder; his long
arm and big hand hold her close.

"There was no one like my father," Sara told a friend when she was
in her late seventies. Neither her husband nor her son ever quite
measured up to her memory of him. That conviction was perhaps
inevitable, cemented before she reached the age of six by her father's
enforced absence and her dreamy secret child's longing to be reunited
with him.

By 1862, Warren Delano's fortunes had improved, not enough to
permit him to come home, but enough for him to arrange passage on
a clipper, the Surprise, and send for his family to join him at Hong
Kong.

Again, Catherine did what he wished without complaint. "I sup
pose it was altogether terrifying to my . . . mother to give up her
beautiful home and its peaceful security for perhaps the rest of her life,"
Sara said later, but if she felt anxiety or resentment she masked it from
the children. Algonac was leased to Warren's old Canton friend, Abbot
Low, the owner of the Surprise, and she resolutely marched her chil
dren aboard at New York on June 25.

The voyage would be a family adventure, the greatest of Sara's
childhood. Seventy-five years later she liked to entertain her great
grandchildren at Hyde Park by singing the chanteys the sailors sang
as they raised the sails:

Down the river hauled a Yankee clipper,
And it's blow, my bully boys, blow!
She's a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper,
And it's blow, my bully boys, blow!

The seven Delano children ranged in age from Louise, now sixteen
and chronically ill, down to Cassie, just two and known to the rest of
the family as "the posthumous child" because she had been born while

Algonac 91

her father was away. Sara was seven. With them went Cousin Nannie
and two nurses.

Catherine Delano kept a detailed journal of the trip. There is not
a word of complaint in it; perilous sea voyages of 128 days were just
another part of her job. Even the prospect of attack from a Confederate
privateer did not faze her. The captain was alarmed when a steamer
appeared on the horizon not long after they got under way, she noted,
but she herself "was perfectly cool and not at all frightened." (It turned
out to be a friendly British vessel.) 8

The children and their nurses were constantly seasick. It snowed
one day off Madagascar, and registered 126 degrees on deck in the
China Sea. Sara developed chilblains; Cassie suffered from heat rash.
It rained for days and Catherine had to keep the children entertained
below deck while the ship pitched and plunged through heavy seas.
There were other long stretches when the clipper rested motionless in
the water, becalmed. The captain was often "very discouraged," Cath
erine noted; she herself never admitted that she was.

Some of the younger children were obstreperous. Warren clam
bered all over the ship; Cassie was "perpetual motion" whenever she
could get free of her nurse's arms. Sara remained cautious and sober,
did as she was told. Her name appears less often in her mother's diary
than those of the other younger children.

She and Philippe were closest, and she often led him by the hand.
Together they climbed into the sailmaker's loft almost every day,
"decidedly a resource," their mother wrote, not knowing that the old
sailor's chief attraction was his ability to jab needles deep into his
callused thumb without apparent pain.

One morning Sara and Philippe were gazing drowsily into the
water when the ship glided past a huge green sunfish, basking on the
surface, twelve feet across from fin to fin. Sara shouted, and a sailor
snatched up a harpoon and drove it into the great fish's back. It was

8. This incident provided another example of Franklin Roosevelt's imaginative version of
his family history. The President must have known what really happened. He had seen three
separate and nearly identical accounts of it in his grandmother's log, found and copied for him
by his Uncle Fred Delano; in the captain's log itself, obtained for the FDR Library, and in Rita
Halle Kleeman's Gracious Lady.

Still, he was unable to resist making more of it than there was. On April 18, 1942, he wrote
to Felix Frankfurter that the Surprise had "passed the Confederate commerce destroyer 'Alabama'
in the night but [was] not seen."

Source: Max Freedman, Roosevelt and Frankfurter, page 656.

92 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

hauled on deck and hacked open: scores of little silver fish spilled onto
the bloody deck.

The voyage was not all arduous or exotic. Captain Ranlett did his
best to make his passengers feel at home. The adults read aloud the
novels of James Fenimore Cooper and leafed through back numbers
of the Atlantic Monthly. The children studied French, sang "Bonnie
Doon," and danced the Virginia Reel around the new piano they were
taking out to Macao.

On the Fourth of July, the captain fired thirteen guns in honor of
the original states and let the older children touch off a fourteenth for
luck. A special frosted cake appeared at tea, and, after dark, skyrockets
were set off on deck. Then, while Captain Ranlett played the organ,
passengers and crew joined in singing "national airs," the thin homey
sound of "Yankee Doodle" drifting out across the black surface of the
alien sea.

The Delano children got their first glimpse of Hong Kong on the
morning of October 31, a blue-gray smudge on the horizon, where
their mother had told them their father lived. Shortly after ten, stand
ing at the rail, Sara saw a small vessel moving purposefully toward
them. It was the family houseboat, a dozen Chinese sailors straining at
the oars.

At the helm, urging his men on, sat her father.

Sara never forgot how he looked at that moment, "all dressed in
white . . . very tall and good-looking, with his side-whiskers and
moustache, coming very quickly up the side of the ship on a ladder the
sailors had let down."

He sprang to the deck of the Surprise and lifted her into the air in
his great arms.

Sara and the rest of the family were carried up to Rose Hill, the
new home her father had readied for them, in what her mother called
"a cavalcade of [sedan] chairs."

"I feel very oddly," Catherine wrote that evening, "to be again a
fanqui. "

Rose Hill was a vast house of whitewashed stone with a big walled
garden that crowned the summit of a hill. The large rooms with their
lofty ceilings and tall shuttered windows were filled with dark English
furniture and Chinese curios. Below the house, down a broad flight of
stone steps cut into the rocky slope, was a grassy natural shelf on which
the family gathered in the late afternoon to watch the older children

Algonac 93

and their friends play lawn tennis. Below them spread the blue harbor
and beyond, the high green hills of the Chinese mainland.

If there had been no junks among the boats that darted back and
forth across the water, Sara might have thought herself gazing down
onto Newburgh Bay from Algonac.

Again, Warren Delano had managed to create for his family an
exclusive world. As much as possible, China was simply ignored.
Nannie taught the children their lessons just as she had at Algonac;
their father even had a set of little straight-backed chairs built for them
just like the ones back home. Sara studied French and practiced the
piano, and she and Warren made crayon drawings of tall-masted ships
and American flags, pasting them along with the words to hymns,
including "Thank God for the Bible," onto the pages of an old account
book on which the number of chests of opium entering and leaving
Chinese ports had been carefully recorded.

There were Chinese servants everywhere, of course: cooks, garden
ers, waiters, stable boys, watchmen, chair bearers. And on warm even
ings a man sat behind a delicately painted screen in the dining room,
gently pulling the rope that moved the big muslin punkah back and
forth above the table to create the sticky semblance of a breeze.

But the servants were expressly forbidden to teach Sara or the other
children a word of Chinese for fear they would learn unsuitable words.
Every morning two tailors sat on the veranda talking together as they
did the family mending. One day Sara asked a friend, the daughter of
a missionary who had spoken Chinese from infancy, what they were
saying.

"Oh, perfectly dreadful things!" the little girl said. "Let's play in
the other room."

There were diversions boat rides to Macao or up the Yangtze
River, with fireworks on the Fourth of July, banquets for the Russell
employees to mark the American holidays. But for Sara her father
remained the greatest diversion of all. "Papa is going to shave in a little
while," she reported at age nine to an aunt back home. "He is just
beginning . . . Papa is at his bath!"

Hong Kong was a crown colony, and most of the foreign commu
nity was English, commercial rivals of Warren's firm and sympathetic
to the Confederate cause. This last did not endear them to Warren,
who once told Ned how he thought Robert E. Lee should be treated
once the war ended; Lee should be hanged, he said, and his bones hung
with those of Jefferson Davis "150 feet above Richmond and let them

94 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

rattle to every North wind that sweeps down from New England
during the next 100 years, or until New England forgets her duty to
God and American liberty."

He was delighted when Sara and Warren decorated their pony cart
with American flags and bunting and drove it proudly to the weekly
horse races at the Happy Valley course. Russell and Company had its
own section in the stands, and Warren took the races very seriously.
So did eleven-year-old Warren III, and one bright afternoon at Happy
Valley he astonished his parents by secretly volunteering to ride a
notoriously skittish horse, "Reindeer," and winning his race against a
field of veteran jockeys.

Comic relief was provided each week by the "Chinese Scramble,"
in which untrained grooms were coaxed into riding against one an
other for a handful of coins. Years later, Sara returned to Hong Kong
and reported back to her father that the scramble had been a disap
pointment. "The Chinese rode very well," she said, "and everyone
says it is not as amusing as it was in the old times when the boys did
not how to ride and would often fall off. Now none are willing to ride
unless they ride well."

Sara spent three years at Rose Hill, during which the last two
Delano children were born, Frederic in 1863, and Laura the next year.
In 1864, seven-year-old Philippe fell dangerously ill with a malady his
frightened parents called "brain fever" and which left him subject to
seizures for the rest of his life.

As soon as he had recovered enough to travel, the Delanos decided
to send him, Sara, and Warren home. China was too dangerous for
young children. Annie, now fifteen, was appointed to care for them
on the journey; she put her hair up, Sara remembered, as a sign of her
new status as a surrogate parent. William Forbes, a junior partner with
Russell and company to whom Dora was now engaged, provided an
escort.

The family was separated again. The children's journey home
included an overland passage across Egypt. Aunt Sarah and Uncle
Ned, now grown immensely fat, met them at the New York dock. Sara
and Philippe were to remain in their charge for two years. Warren was
sent off to boarding school. Most of Sara's time was spent in their stern
but indulgent grandfather's home at Fairhaven. While she was there
her step-grandmother died. She demanded to see the body. Her nurse
tried to dissuade her but she was adamant. The memory of the dark-

Algonac 95

ened chamber and the sight of the old woman "so long and thin and
drawn and still" haunted her all her life.

Few of her letters from this period survive. She must again have
sometimes felt isolated and apart, but no hint of that intrudes in any
of them. She was not to worry people. On April 10, 1865, she wrote
to her father that the Civil War was over. "I am so very happy! All
the bells of town are ringing and they are firing the cannon near the
house!"

Wealthy again at the war's end, and unable to return to Algonac
until the Lows' lease ran out in 1867, Warren now toyed with the
notion of raising his family in even greater isolation than that afforded
by his Hudson River aerie. "I have for some years past had in mind
a plan of European residence and education," he told Ned. He would
first sell Algonac, then "take the whole family down to the youngest
to Europe [and] seek out a fine old country residence in a hilly country
where woods abound and where saddle horses are good and cheap."
An estate in the Pyrenees would do nicely. "I should want it to a great
degree if not entirely isolated from our countrymen or others who
would speak English habitually, and I should want to organize my
household as to combine the real comforts and proper luxuries of life
with a system of order and regularity of studies, duties, exercise and
recreation." It was American snobs he said he wanted most to avoid,
"pretentious, boasting," the sort of people "that will disgust the world
with what they call Yankees." So great was his dislike of them that he
felt "almost inclined to do what might be considered equally snobbish
and in our retreat sink for the time being our name of Delano and write
ourselves 'de la Noye.' "

Instead, he rented an opulent apartment in Paris, overlooking the
Bois de Boulogne.

Sara spent most of the next four years abroad, the first in Paris,
where she celebrated her twelfth birthday in September of 1866 and
attended her sister Dora's wedding to Will Forbes at the American
Church the following spring. There was a wedding breakfast after
wards to say goodbye to the bride and groom as they set off for China
and Rose Hill, which would remain their home for all their married
life.

That evening Sara fell ill. It turned out to be rheumatic fever, and
she spent nearly five weeks in bed, often in great pain but outwardly
always cheerful, and apologetic when she could not help crying out
as the bedding was changed. This was to be the only prolonged illness

96 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

in her long life, made more memorable by the reeking sulphur baths
which the French doctor prescribed. The long tin tub was brought to
the building each day lashed to the roof of a horse-drawn cab, then
carried upstairs to the Delano apartment. There Sara was immersed in
the hot solution, everything of gold or silver having first been removed
from the room to prevent tarnish from the fumes.

The Paris Universal Exposition was held in the French capital that
year and Sara was allowed to sit out on the balcony on warm days
wrapped in blankets and watch as one by one Europe's leaders clat
tered past on their way to and from the grounds. The Empress Euge
nie was an almost daily passerby. Czar Alexander II of Russia came,
too, and so did Emperor Wilhelm I of Prussia, accompanied by his
prime minister, Count Otto von Bismarck, in a splendid uniform.

The Delanos moved on to Dresden and rented a house for the
winter, just as James and Rebecca Roosevelt had done the previous
year. Mr. Delano had not entirely abandoned his scheme of "European
residence and education," at least for his children. Sara attended a local
school for young ladies where she studied German and music. Many
of her classmates were Americans, daughters of other wealthy families
spending the season on the Continent. Maggie Carey, Sara's best
friend, was one of them. Her mother was an Astor, the sister of Aunt
Laura Delano, with a summer house at Beacon, just across the Hudson
from Algonac. Now they had a house in the same neighborhood, and
after school the two girls could walk together to the Zwinger Teich
to skate, whirling for hours to Strauss waltzes played by a band in
overcoats on an island in the center of the frozen pond.

Most of the family went home at last to Algonac in the early
summer of 1868, but Warren and Annie stayed at Hanover with Uncle
Ned and Aunt Sarah, who would spend the next two years in Europe
watching over their brother's offspring. Sara attended finishing school
in the nearby village of Celle, living in the home of the burgomaster's
daughter. Summers were spent with her aunt and uncle, the remainder
of the first summer on an island in the North Sea, all of the second in
the Harz Mountains. A continuing flood of fond and cheerful family
letters helped fend off homesickness.

In May of 1869 a letter arrived from Algonac whose sadness could
not be disguised: Louise, Sara's eldest sister, had died at twenty-three.
It had not been entirely unexpected. She had been ill off and on all her
life, and her father wrote that death had come as a blessed release from
suffering. But it was shocking nonetheless, the first death among the

Algonac 97

Delanos of Algonac. There would be five more in the next few years.
On Louise's birthday in 1870, Sara was given her watch as a pre
cious souvenir. By then Sara, her brother and sister, and their aunt and
uncle had all returned to Algonac. They sailed for home in June of that
year aboard the Westphalia, the last steamship to leave a German port
before the Franco-Prussian War began.

At first Sara simply enjoyed being part of the family routine again.
"Life was very regular at Algonac," she remembered. "Friends visited
us; no large parties, just relatives and friends who came one or two or
three at a time." The family still attended Unitarian services in New-
burgh nearly every Sunday, and when weather or illness prevented it,
Mr. Delano presided over household prayers in the library. The Dela
nos had adopted the old Lyman custom of reading aloud, and Sara
recalled that "most of the standard literature . . . came to me in that
delightful easy way and we took turns reading while others worked."
Sara rode in the summer, sleighed in the winter, played whist in the
evenings. There were visits to Fairhaven and to Steen Valetje at Barry-
town, the splendid turreted home of the Franklin Delanos.

Life at Algonac remained the same, but Sara had changed. She was
a young woman now: tall, stately, still reserved, at home in French and
German. The younger children were a little intimidated by her. Fred
remembered that when they all gathered in the schoolroom each morn
ing she blocked out their chatter with her "determined hands" over her
ears, while making her grown-up way through a six-volume history of
the world.

In January of 1873, her father wrote Warren, "Sallie attended her
first great city party . . . and Mrs. Carey reports . . . that she looked
very handsome (No doubt of it) and received much attention, which
I hope will not turn the dear little pussy's head." Another "grand
affair" was coming up, for which Sara "will be dressed by Aunt Laura
and very handsomely, and we shall feel a good deal of interest in
hearing how she gets through the ordeal, for such it is to a novice fresh
from country life."

Sara bore up well, and each winter thereafter spent several weeks
attending balls and cotillions and dinners with one or another of her
New York friends Maggie Carey, Bamie Roosevelt, or Nelly Blod-
gett, daughter of the varnish king with whom the James Roosevelts
had sailed for England in 1865. Sara was a bridesmaid at Maggie
Carey's wedding to an elegant diplomat, Alphonse de Steurs, the

98 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Dutch charge d'affaires. The groom, Sara told her parents, was u the
nicest foreigner I have ever met," and the most handsome.

She and her sisters attracted many suitors, "an avalanche of young
men," their father once wrote. One especially enthusiastic visitor fell
in love with four of them in turn Annie, Sallie, Kassie (who now
insisted on spelling her nickname with a "K"), and Laura. He would
have kept at it indefinitely, Sara thought, had the supply of sisters held
up.

There was brisk competition among the girls. A Newburgh neigh
bor had three sons, the most courtly and handsome of whom Mr.
Delano nicknamed u the Marquis of Salisbury." All four sisters vied for
his attention. "The Marquis is very attentive," Annie wrote to her
brother in triumph one spring day. "He took me for my first rowing
lesson on Tuesday, and yesterday he came for Marianne (her maid)
and me. We were out two hours. The shade under the bank was
charming . . . Poor Sallie is off for Irvington."

"Pretty ears are all Dora needs to be perfect," Sara once wrote to
Warren with sweet malice, and when Sara's glowing complexion was
remarked upon (as it often was), Kassie liked to say loudly, "We do
believe Sallie paints" just to annoy her.

Sara never got overtly angry, just more dignified, a fact which
greatly amused her father: "Sallie had a presentiment that she would
do something wicked," he wrote on a spring evening in 1876, "and
accomplished the feat in the afternoon." One April Fool's Day, Kassie
was sitting quietly in the music room when Sara glided past, after a
walk in the garden, resplendent in a red silk dress and a hat with a long
green feather. "I am going to take a bath and change my clothes," she
announced. "Then I shall come down to practice and I hope I may
have this room to myself."

Kassie waited until she was confident her sister's bath had begun,
then rang the doorbell and sent a servant upstairs with the calling card
of a handsome and much-admired West Point cadet, known in the
family as "the Pilgrim father" because of his frequent references to his
Massachusetts lineage. Sara dressed again as fast as she could and
appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, a bit flushed but smiling
welcome.

Her sister sat grinning on the sofa. "It is I who have the honor of
calling on you, Miss Sallie April Fool," Kassie said, rising and bowing
deeply.

Sara strode from the room without a word.

Algonac 99

In matters of the heart as in everything else, Sara's father's word
was law. He had begun to fail physically. In 1870 he lost the sight in
his left eye when the retina became detached. Two years later, striding
along the aisles of a New York dry goods store in search of winter
supplies, he stepped blindly to the left and fell to the bottom of an
elevator shaft. His hip was shattered. He was brought home in agony,
remained in bed for thirteen weeks, managed to get around the place
on crutches, seemed fully recovered, then fell again and, further weak
ened by lumbago, had to settle for a cane.

All three of the most important men in Sara's life became invalids.
She would consider it her duty to care for each of them in turn.

On his sixty-eighth birthday in 1877, her father pronounced him
self "Age 50 above the shoulders, 86 below." Still, his grip on Algonac
and the lives of all who lived there never loosened. He sent some
suitors away, prowled the parlor when his daughters entertained, de
cided whose invitations could be accepted and whose must be turned
down.

Dora had to wait to marry until Will Forbes had earned his
$100,000 competence as a Russell partner. Annie, too, fell in love with
a Russell man, a heavyset earnest young clerk named Frederick Hitch.
He came from a fine family but had entered the firm with no funds
of his own. Warren insisted that there be no wedding until Hitch, too,
had become a wealthy man. Fred and Annie may have discussed mar
riage as early as 1865, when she was only sixteen. If so, she loyally
waited for him for nine years; they were not permitted to marry until
the autumn of 1877.

Mr. Delano was no gentler with the private lives of his sons. When
young Warren was sent away to school he was bombarded with his
father's admonitions and advice. The boy was never to put on airs or
dress better than his schoolmates; he must not borrow money or stay
awake past ten, and when he slept had to keep the window open four
to twelve inches. He should not be tempted to drink "or taste even,
wine or beer. . . . Touch not tobacco." In fact he was to "Do nothing,
touch nothing, say nothing, that you will not do, or touch, or say in
the presence of your father, your dear mama, or your loving sisters.
Do nothing in secret that you would not do in the light of the sun."

Later, when his son was studying engineering at the Lawrence
Scientific School at Harvard, there were social directives as well: "I
want you to call on Mr. [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow [the vener
able poet and an old friend of the Lymans]. First dress yourself prop-

100 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

erly for the occasion and . . . have as much conversation with him as
Mr. Longfellow appears to have the time and inclination to bestow
upon you and to help you to talk you may refer to your voyages to
China and back."

Warren was a genial, handsome young man, bearded and athletic
"nothing short of a demi-god" to his younger brothers as deter
mined as his father but at least initially more playful. At Harvard he
had applied his engineering skills to hoisting a big wooden top hat onto
the head of the figure that surmounts the Soldiers Monument, sixty
feet above the Cambridge Common; it took the combined forces of the
police and fire departments two hours to knock it off again. 9

He was graduated in 1874, hoping to travel west as a mining
engineer. His father had other plans for him, however, and he went
to work instead as superintendent of one of Warren Delano's enter
prises, the Union Mining Company, digging coal and shale from
deposits near Mount Savage, Maryland, and making firebrick from the
local clay.

While still at Harvard he had met and fallen in love with Miss
Jennie Walters of Baltimore. Her brother was a classmate of Warren's
and had introduced them. She was both beautiful and unusually well
educated, attending classes at Harvard and living with other young
women in the home of Professor James Bradstreet Greenough, a

9. Mr. Delano's parental reactions were not always predictable. He was evidently amused
by young Warren's Harvard prank, but four years later, when his youngest son, Fred, took part
in something similar but on a much smaller scale, he was outraged. Fred was thirteen in 1878,
a boarding student at the Adams Academy in Quincy, Massachusetts, when he and several other
boys rigged up a miniature cannon so that it would go off loudly but harmlessly on the second
floor of the school after everyone was in bed. Dr. William Everett, the headmaster, was "a
highstrung, nervous man," Fred recalled many years later, and interrogated all sixty boys as to
who had been responsible. "When it came my turn, he asked if I knew anything about the
incident. I could not say that I did not. ... I said that I did, but refused to tell who had a hand
in it." All the other boys denied knowing anything at all. As a result, the headmaster put Fred
on a train for home that afternoon. His father met him at the Newburgh depot "in great distress,"
and when they reached Algonac not even his mother was allowed to speak to him. "There was
no suggestion of sympathy on anyone's part. I was treated as a disgraced boy." He was kept in
his room. A servant brought him his meals. This went on for several weeks while his father and
Dr. Everett carried on a long anguished correspondence about the boy's future. Finally, he was
allowed to go back to school for his final examinations.

Years later, after Warren Delano died and Fred was cleaning out his father's desk, he found
a packet of more than a dozen letters dealing with this incident and its aftermath and was
astonished to discover that Dr. Everett had proposed only a short suspension; his father had urged
expulsion. The boy was "forever disgraced," he had written. "He even went so far," Fred
remembered, "as to say that if he were to rear another family, he was inclined to think he would
seek a home among the Chinese, because in China the sons of the family could be depended on
and honor their parents and live up to their standards."

Source: An unpublished autobiographical sketch by Fred Delano, kindly provided to me by
his grandson, Frederic D. Grant, Jr.

Algonac 101

champion of women's education who later helped found Radcliffe.

Her father forbade her to marry. William Thompson Walters was
a curious man. He had organized the Atlantic Coast Railroad Line,
made himself many times a millionaire, and compiled one of the finest
collections of French art in America. Major works by Delacroix and
Corot, Millet and Gerome covered the walls of his big house on Mount
Vernon Street; and he traveled to Europe to pick up more so often that
two large galleries had eventually to be added to hold the overflow. A
diminutive man under five feet tall and unshaven rather than
bearded, he introduced the giant French percheron horse to America,
and he had grown increasingly eccentric since his wife's death in 1862.

Jennie was his only daughter, and whenever she was at home she
managed his cluttered household as best she could and acted as hostess
to his infrequent guests. So far as he was concerned she was not to
marry Warren Delano or anyone else; life without her would be intol
erable. When she protested that she was truly in love, he ordered her
not to see her admirer or even to write to him for two years. If she
defied him he would cut her out of his will, bar her from his home.

She stuck to her resolve. Her father stopped speaking to her, and
they lived together for months in what Mr. Delano called "that ill-
regulated mansion," picking their way among "the groups and piles
of works of art" in total silence. Warren's father was sympathetic to
his plight. The ban on correspondence was "an unreasonable course,"
he said, but he warned against doing anything hasty. "Be patient,
prudent," he warned, or there would be "a more or less violent sever
ance of relations with Mr. Walters, for which neither Jennie nor you
are prepared."

Tempers cooled, although Mr. Walters was never fully reconciled
to the marriage, and in May of 1875 the young couple announced their
engagement to their closest friends. They were married in July at a
country church not far from the Walters' country residence. Warren's
family almost did not attend, Mr. Walters having stubbornly refused
to invite them until the last minute, and the wedding itself was under
standably subdued. Only a handful of friends and neighbors came. The
Delanos sat alone in their pew. After the ceremony, Mr. Delano noted,
the bride and groom "left the church together, followed by W. T.
Walters, my family, and the audience, [who] without congratulations
or demonstrations of any kind, dispersed."

The marriage was solid and affectionate in spite of its strained
beginning, and in 1877 the young Delanos had a son. He was chris-

102 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

tened Warren Delano IV in the presence of his proud grandfather at
Algonac, just moments after Annie married Fred Hitch.

Sara Delano was known all her adult life for the strength of her
will. But in its first real test her resolution proved weaker than Jennie
Walters' had been.

Sara had her share of suitors but so far as we know seems to have
taken only one seriously, Stanford White whom she and everyone
else then called "Stanny." His aunt, Mrs. Laura Fellows, lived nearby,
and he and his older brother, Richard, had been frequent summer
visitors at Algonac over the years. They took the Delano sisters sailing,
accompanied them on picnics, played croquet with them across the
smooth lawns. But in the summer of 1876 the old friendship between
Stanford White and Sara may have flared into something more.

White was twenty-three that year and a whirlwind, tall and thin
with bristling red hair, freckles, a flaring mustache, and bright intense
eyes. He slammed doors, never walked when he could run, boomed
out things like "Thunder and guns!" and "Gin and seltzer!" when he
got excited (which was often), and liked to whistle airs from Don
Giovanni when there was even a moment's lapse in the conversation.
Music was just one of his enthusiasms; he also loved sporty clothes, fine
horses, fishing, architecture, and art; he carried a sketchbook under his
arm and had a way of pronouncing a Hudson Valley sunset "bully"
and rushing outside to capture it on paper in rapid sure strokes of
watercolor.

He evidently fascinated Sara. He appalled her father, who called
him "the red-headed trial." To him Stanford White must have seemed
everything unwanted in a son-in-law. He was noisy, intrusive, over
confident, unreliable, and without prospects. There was nothing
wrong with his Massachusetts family. His grandfather had been a
wealthy clipper merchant, but steamships had put him out of business,
and young Stanny's father, Richard White, was a foppish aesthete
reduced to piecing together a living writing reviews of music and
literature. Worse, Stanny himself had hoped to be an artist, giving it
up at seventeen only when the painter John La Farge told him that in
art there was precious little prestige and still less money. For some five
years now he had been one of several badly paid draftsmen in the office
of the eminent Boston architect H. H. Richardson and though War
ren Delano may not have known of it he had also begun a lifelong
series of affairs with women who were, as a member of his family later

Algonac 103

said, "not of his class." He spoke loud and often of striking out soon
on his own, but Sara's father had little reason to believe him. As a
husband and provider, Stanford White seemed a terrible risk.

One afternoon at Algonac, Mr. Delano came upon Sara unwrap
ping a huge basket filled with flowers White had sent her. "I suppose
those are from the red-headed trial," he said. "Remember that I don't
care for that at all."

But Sara evidently did care for White; she may even have loved
him. It is impossible to measure the depth of their feelings for one
another in that reticent age now so long ago. No letters between them
survive. But if she was in love, she must have been deeply torn. In her
desire to please and placate her father, she was her mother's daughter;
but she was her father's child in her determination to have what she
wanted, and she did not want to give up Stanford White.

The decision was put off. Dora and her husband had been home
on leave and were now about to make their way back to Hong Kong.
Sara was evidently told to go with them and see what time and distance
might do to her infatuation.

She was away for nine months. She visited England, where she first
savored English country life at the home of Will and Dora's friends,
watched the races at Ascot, and heard Prime Minister Gladstone and
Lord Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli speak at Westminster. Half a
century later, in 1929, she took several of her grandchildren to see
George Arliss in the film Disraeli. When the gaunt, hawk-nosed actor
appeared on the screen, she startled the children by hissing loudly,
"But he is Beaconsfield!"

At Hong Kong a smitten British officer sent her a beautifully
carved ivory fan. Dora intervened in her father's absence, reminding
Sara that, like Stanford White, the young man was without sufficient
means to be a proper suitor. Sara sent back the gift with a note gently
suggesting that it might better be sent to the officer's sister.

At Paris on her way home the following spring, Sara took a long
walk in the Bois de Boulogne and stopped to pick a bouquet of the
daisies and buttercups that grew there beneath the ancient trees. It all
reminded her overwhelmingly of Algonac. "Dear Papa," she wrote
that night, "sometimes I feel I would do anything for a little talk with
you."

Time had done its work. She had come around. Her father's ap
proval still meant more to her than her own independence or the bright
promises of Stanford White or any other man.

104 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

She returned home that summer. White paid a visit to Algonac on
the evening of September 16. Whether he saw her then or only spoke
to her father we do not know. But he never called again.

Seven years later, on February 7, 1884, White married Bessie
Springs Smith of Smithtown, Long Island. He had by then become
one of the most celebrated and prosperous architects in America. Writ
ing in the Algonac diary that evening, Warren Delano tersely noted:
"Mr. Stanford White is married today." 10

Sara met James Roosevelt three years after she gave up Stanford
White. She was twenty-six. Her devotion to her father had not dimin
ished, and she now shared the running of the household with her
mother, hiring servants and firing them if they displeased her. But
Dora and Annie were already married. So was Maggie Carey. If she
did not marry now she might never get another chance. None of the
objections her father made to White could fairly be made against Mr.
James. He was in many ways very like her father far closer to his age
than hers, sober, wealthy, self-assured. We cannot know precisely
what she felt for him then, but for someone so devoted to her father,
so accustomed to doing what he wished without question, those
similarities must have mattered. In a sense, Mr. James may have been
the next best thing.

10. Dr. Nona Ferdon, in her pioneering unpublished thesis, Franklin D, Roosevelt: A Psycho
logical Interpretation of His Childhood and Youth (page 145), reports that "in confidential conversa
tion with a recognized Roosevelt scholar" living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1970, she was
told that "Stanford White was the only man Sara Roosevelt ever loved." The scholar was Frank
Freidel, who was told the story by a member of the Delano family.

This was clearly an exaggeration, but Sara's friend and biographer, Rita Kleeman, provides
some suggestive evidence that there was a thwarted romance. On page 83 of Gracious Lady she
notes that Stanford White, "a magnificent looking boy with a shock of flaming red hair" was
a frequent caller at Algonac. On the same page she tells of "one red-haired young man who was
exceedingly attentive" to Sara. Her father disapproved of this suitor, calling him "the red-headed
trial," and eventually had her send him away. Warren Delano's disapproval "ended it for Sallie,"
Kleeman continues, "for she still thought that her father knew more than any one else in the
world and that whatever he said was right."

Since Sara herself must have been the source of both these stories, I suspect she may have
told her friend rather more than she had meant to reveal about her relationship with White and
that either then or later the two women agreed to separate the two anecdotes out of respect for
the memory of Mr. James. It should also be remembered that Warren Delano was not wrong
about White's reliability as a husband, as Sara and the world learned in 1906, when he was
murdered in the presence of his former mistress by her deranged husband. Sara may well have
told the story originally to Mrs. Kleeman more as an example of her father's perspicacity than
as a romantic tale about herself.

Further evidence is provided by the Algonac diaries which record White's frequent visits
to Algonac in the summer of 1876 and none at all after September 16, 1877. My account also
helps explain Sara's otherwise curiously sudden decision to accompany Will and Dora Forbes
back to China in 1876 and her very short stay at Rose Hill. After taking nearly six months to
get there, she started home again in less than a month.

Algonac 105

The wedding day was set for October 7, but preparations for it did
not absorb the family's attention as fully as they might have that
summer. Cousin Nannie Church, who had taught all the children their
lessons, had died suddenly the previous January, Sara, her mother, and
her sisters all still wore mourning dress when Mr. James first called at
Algonac. Then, on August 11, just a few days after Sara's secret had
been revealed to family and friends, and several days before news of
the engagement appeared in the newspapers, Aunt Sarah died at Al
gonac of cancer. Mr. James accompanied the family to the burial
services at Fairhaven and there was introduced to a host of Delano
cousins. Mr. Delano was pleased, of course, that Roosevelt "devotes
himself to Sallie who in her turn is absorbed in thought of him," but
was privately gleeful when his worldly future son-in-law seemed "a
little surprised at the luxury and comfort surrounding the old home."

Sara had greatly loved the aunt for whom she had been named, and
out of respect for her memory the scale of her wedding was considera
bly reduced. Only 125 close friends and members of the family were
invited.

It was a splendid afternoon, the wooded shores above the river
brilliant with autumn. Guests arriving from New York were met at the
Newburgh ferry landing and driven to Algonac in a fleet of Delano
carriages, the New York World reported, and "many of the villagers and
residents in the pretty country cottages on the roadside turned out to
do honor" to them as they passed.

The Algonac gardeners had draped the parlor walls with ropes of
ivy, and an alcove had been "metamorphosed into a floral chancel"
with ferns and palms and wild flowers. Family and guests watched as
Sara swept to her place beneath a canopy of blossoms, tall and regal
in a gown of white brocade, her bridegroom's wedding gift of five
strands of pearls around her neck.

Mr. James took his place beside her in a morning coat, his gray
side-whiskers freshly combed. And there, shortly after three o'clock,
they exchanged their vows.

Many years later, a guest remembered that several elderly women
in the back of the room "were crying that such a lovely girl should
marry an old man."

Sara dutifully became a Roosevelt when she married Mr. James.
Even the manner of her journeying from her father's house to her
husband's seemed designed to make that clear. She emerged from
Algonac after the wedding beautiful in a black hat and going-away

106 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

gown of mourning black and gray. Mr. James helped her into the
Delano victoria waiting beneath the porte cochere, then took his seat
beside her. Michael French, the Algonac coachman, snapped his whip
and the couple spun off down the gravel path. It was precisely four-
twenty by Warren Delano's pocket watch. Beyond the gate they
turned north toward Hyde Park. At Milton, roughly halfway home,
they drew up alongside Mr. James's liveried coachman and his T-cart,
waiting under the trees. Mr. Delano's victoria returned empty to Al
gonac; his daughter rode on to Springwood in the Roosevelt carriage,
Mr. James himself holding the reins.

The Roosevelts spent what Sara recalled as "a happy month" to
gether at Hyde Park before embarking on an extended honeymoon in
Europe. They rode together each morning, their horses' hooves scat
tering drifts of leaves, and on sunny afternoons Mr. James rowed them
up and down the river. In the evenings they often dined with neigh
bors or with Mr. James's mother and his brother's family at Rosedale.
Years later, John Roosevelt's daughter Ellen recalled that whenever
she knew Aunt Sallie was coming to dinner she asked to be allowed
to stay up long enough to catch a glimpse of her "so tall and slim and
lovely in a dress of dark velvet."

Sara had little to do that month except to be lovely and affectionate.
The Algonac housekeeper had come up before the wedding to arrange
the bride's things in the bureau drawers of her new bedroom. Spring-
wood was still managed by Elespie, just as it had been in Rebecca
Roosevelt's day; a cook and housemaid carried out her orders.

Reminders of Rebecca were everywhere, and Mr. James did not
encourage change. He seems to have hoped to recreate as precisely as
possible the life he had led with his first wife. If Sara ever resented this,
she did not openly object. Like her father, her husband had the right
to have his home precisely as he wished. He did not, for example, much
enjoy the traditional Lyman and Delano custom of reading aloud; Sara
gave it up and played bezique with him every evening they were alone
together, just as Rebecca had.

Still, Sara remained a Delano. She and her father saw to that.
During the first month of her marriage she went home twice to Al
gonac while James was in New York on business, and twice her
parents visited Springwood. Throughout their married life the Roose
velts journeyed to Algonac or Fairhaven whenever the Delanos gath
ered: Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and anniversaries. If Mr.
James disliked being so subsumed by his wife's family he left no record
of it.

Algonac 107

Both Roosevelts traveled to Algonac for several days toward the
end of their first month together and there witnessed a giant Republi
can torchlight parade in honor of James A. Garfield and Chester A.
Arthur, Mr. James's old acquaintance from Union College. The presi
dential contest was especially bitter that year, and it must have been
a somewhat strained occasion. Mr. Delano had contributed heavily to
Garfield's campaign. Mr. James liked Arthur well enough, but he had
loyally backed the Democrats while again declining their nomination
for Congress. We know that he watched with his in-laws as the Repub
licans paraded through Newburgh with their placards and flares, and
can only assume he was embarrassed for his party when, from the
darkness, local Democrats began pelting the marchers with eggs and
bottles.

Mr. James voted his convictions at Hyde Park on Election Day,
November 2. Garfield and the Republicans won, and Mr. Delano's
pleasure in their triumph was tainted only by the stubborn Democracy
of his own servants. "All my Irish employees from French down," he
told his son, "not only voted the Irish ticket but show signs of such
anger at the result that another week will probably see 3 or 4 of them
discharged from service."

The Roosevelts sailed for Europe aboard the Germanic five days
later. Uncle Ned, Laura, and Sara's parents all came to New York to
say goodbye. "Sallie sad going off," her father noted, "but bears it
bravely enough." They spent ten months abroad, together but rarely
alone, visiting a multitude of friends and relatives then living on the
Continent and in England. Will and Dora Forbes spent three weeks
with them in Rome, and the Roosevelts stayed for a time with the
Franklin Delanos at Geneva. The whole Algonac family met them in
Paris, where Mr. Delano had hired an entire floor of the Hotel du
Rhim for a month-long reunion; James patiently took Sara's mother
and sisters to the Opera in the evenings and for long drives in the Bofs
de Boulogne in the afternoons.

In Spain, James nursed Sara through a brief illness and bought her
an old lace mantilla to cheer her up. "James too devoted to me," she
wrote in her new diary. They gazed together into the glowing pit of
Mount Vesuvius while "burning stones fell all around us," and visited
Ghent, where Sara showed James the coat of arms of her remote
ancestor, Jehan de Lannoye, carved in the cathedral wall. At Scheve-
ningen in Holland they bought an old Dutch clock and ordered a
massive sideboard built for the Springwood dining room, made up of
carved medieval panels.

108 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

On Sunday morning, August 21, 1881, the Roosevelts attended
services at York Cathedral in England. "I nearly fainted, giving James
a little fright," Sara confided to her diary that night, u but the feeling
passed over." She was nearly four months pregnant, and it was time
to sail for home.

The Roosevelts settled back into life at Hyde Park to await the
baby. The Delano seamstress came to alter Sara's dresses. Mr. James
surprised her with a Chickering grand piano on their first anniversary.
Friends came and went.

Sara's Uncle Ned had died suddenly of a heart attack aboard his
yacht, while they were still abroad. She was again in mourning. Then
her brother Philippe fell ill. He had grown into a tall, slender young
man, gifted and outgoing but always delicate, and a special favorite of
Sara's. His father had sent him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study
the year before he wrote with zest and wit and could recite long
passages of prose or poetry after a single reading but repeated sei
zures drove him home, and a male companion was hired to remain with
him day and night. Then, on December 10, he suffered a massive
seizure. Twenty-four more followed over the next forty-eight hours.
He died on the morning of December 12.

The Roosevelts hurried to Algonac. Philippe was to be buried in
the family plot at Fairhaven, but Sara was far enough along in her
pregnancy, her father wrote, so that it was thought "not quite safe" for
her to accompany the family. Mr. James stayed behind with her at
Algonac and helped care for Warren Delano IV, her older brother's
four-year-old-son. "It is a comfort to have Baby Warren," she wrote,
"and though my thoughts are in Fairhaven, I have to be happy with
the baby. We take him to drive and to the farm to see the animals and
James tells him splendid stories."

CHAPTER

THE VERY NICE CHILD

"In thinking back to my earliest days/' Franklin Roosevelt once wrote,
"I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things both in
respect to places and people. Up to the age of seven . . . Hyde Park
was the center of the world." He almost failed to occupy that world
at all. His mother's pregnancy had gone smoothly enough, but the
birth itself when it finally came nearly killed her and her son. Precisely
what went wrong we do not know.

"Sallie's troubles began," Mr. James wrote, at seven-thirty on Sun
day evening, January 29, 1882. The contractions continued all night,
growing more frequent and intense. Mrs. Carrie Lee, a trained nurse,
was at her side. The baby was long overdue; Mrs. Lee had been living
at Springwood for two weeks, waiting for this moment. At dawn Mr.
James sent for Dr. Edward H. Parker of Poughkeepsie. He arrived at
nine-thirty, stamping the snow from his boots.

The morning inched past, and then the afternoon. Mr. James
moved from window to window, staring out at the empty white land
scape and trying not to hear Dr. Parker's exhortations to bear down
or Sara's answering cries of pain. The baby would not come.

Toward evening the doctor came downstairs long enough to tell
him that things looked grave. At seven, Sara's mother arrived from
Algonac; her son-in-law, pale and grim, met her at the depot with the
alarming news.

By eight o'clock, Sara lay exhausted. She had been in labor for more

110 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

than twenty-four hours. In the hope that at least the mother might be
saved, Dr. Parker administered chloroform. Mrs. Lee was sure the baby
would be born dead. And when he finally slid into the world forty-five
minutes later, it seemed she had been right. He was a big baby "he
weighed 10 Ibs. without clothes," Mr. James noted later but he was
blue and eerily still. Dr. Parker lifted the infant from the bed, placed
its small mouth to his own, and began to blow into its lungs. The baby
took one shuddering breath, another, and then began a thin angry
reassuring squall. Sara did not hear it.

When she had finally recovered consciousness and seemed out of
danger, her weary husband scrawled a note to his sister-in-law, Ellen
Roosevelt. Dr. Parker dropped it off at Rosedale on his way back to
town: "I have only a moment to write you that Sallie has a bouncing
boy; poor child, she has had a very hard time."

That hard time may have had much to do with the extraordinarily
powerful bond between mother and son that was forged during the
first moments of Franklin Roosevelt's life and remained intact until the
last instant of hers. Sara spent a month in bed recovering from her
ordeal, and later that spring suffered what seemed to be a relapse that
greatly frightened Mr. James. Dr. Parker came to see her often, and
it seems likely that he advised her it would be wisest not to have more
children.

The fragility of life was evident all around her. She herself had
nearly died. So had her baby. Uncle Ned and Philippe were gone. And
on February 12, just twelve days after her son's birth, little Warren
Delano IV, who had been such a comfort to her during her brother's
funeral, died at Algonac of typhoid fever and was buried beneath one
of the great trees that shaded the lawn.

Her baby's well-being became the central object of her life. She
would not have a second chance.

She would never fully trust her boy to anyone else. "At the very
outset he was plump, pink and nice," she recalled. "I used to love to
bathe and dress him, although I took the responsibility of lifting and
turning him rather seriously. I suppose all young mothers are a little
fearful in the beginning of dropping their babies, and in that respect
I was no different from the rest. Still, I felt . . . that every mother ought
to learn to care for her own baby, whether she can afford to delegate
the task to some one else or not."

That kind of delegation was the rule among mothers of Sara Roose-

The Very Nice Child 111

velt's class, and the love of a nurse was often a substitute for the
maternal love then being lavished elsewhere. Young Winston Church
ill, for example, eight years older than Franklin Roosevelt, was ignored
at first by his beautiful but self-obsessed American mother and actively
disliked by his erratic father. The devotion of his nurse, Mrs. Everest,
meant nearly everything to him. "Mrs. Everest it was who looked after
me and tended all my wants," he wrote. "It was to her I poured out
my many troubles." Her photograph hung in his bedroom until he
died.

Sara Delano Roosevelt would brook no such rival. Mr. James hired
an English nurse for the baby a few days after he was born; she proved
overly intrusive and was dismissed. Dora Forbes found another one
two months later. She was Scottish, Sara wrote, "a good and ex
perienced woman and very gentle," named Helen McRorie. She
would stay for nine years and be called "Ellen" by the older Roosevelts
and "Mamie" by her charge. 1

The baby's own name had been a problem. By naming Rosy after
himself twenty-eight years earlier, Mr. James had broken the Roosevelt
tradition of calling eldest sons alternately James and Isaac. He now
wished to return to it in honor of his late father. Sara thought Isaac
a dreadful name. She wanted instead to name the baby Warren Delano
Roosevelt after her own father, and Mr. James acquiesced.

The death of his first grandson had kept Mr. Delano from seeing
his second for more than a month, but on March 9, the old man finally
drove up to Hyde Park and declared himself delighted. The baby was
"a beautiful little fellow well and strong and well-behaved," he
wrote, "with a good-shaped head of the Delano type." He was pleased,
too, that Sara wished to name her son for him but suspected that the
mourning parents of Warren IV might find a new Warren in the
family hard to bear. He volunteered to see if he couldn't persuade his
son to permit it nonetheless. If Warren's wife, Jennie, objected to

1, In 1934, while visiting friends in Canada, Sara Delano Roosevelt paid a call on Ellen
McRorie, then long retired and living in a home for the elderly at Hamilton. "She is 89," Mrs.
Roosevelt reported to her son in the White House, "and has a wonderful memory. We had a
good talk and she remembered everything about you and even asked about nearly every member
of the family. In sitting by her and talking I got accustomed to the change in her (very thin and
frail), but the same fine old deep set eyes. She cannot see well, but tho' she only saw me dimly
she knew my voice and felt that I had not changed much. [Mrs. Roosevelt was herself then
eighty.] When you speak over the radio the nurse tells her and she listens to you and lives in
the thought of you. She told little stories of how [Elespie] tried to spoil you and never could say
u were such a 'ood bo' and onl sometimes full of mischief. I told her that I felt

no, but you were such a 'good boy' and only
her fine sterling qualities had helped
Source: Roosevelt Family Papers, FD

that her fine sterling qualities had helped you always and given you a wonderful start. "

RL.

112 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

hearing another child "called a name so dear," he wrote, all that he had
to do was say so. But he and Jennie should keep in mind that "this is
not a Warren Delano but for some time will be 'baby Roosevelt,' and
he is really so fine a child, and so distinctively Delano in form, that he
will not physically at least discredit the name." Sara had proposed an
alternative Franklin Delano, after her rich childless uncle but, her
father continued, "the idea that might be suggested that this name is
given with some idea of possible advantage to come from the wealth
of Uncle Frank deters."

* . Warren wired back that neither he nor Jennie could endure having
another child in the family named Warren so soon after their great loss.
"We are disappointed," Sara wrote, "and so is Papa, but of course there
is nothing to say." And so, on March 20, in the small heated chapel
not far from St. James, the baby was christened Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. There were two godfathers, one from each side of the
family: Will Forbes (too plagued by gout to attend) and Elliott Roose
velt, who, had he lived, would have eventually become the baby's
father-in-law as well Nelly Blodgett, Sara's girlhood friend, was the
godmother.

Sara never entirely abandoned her wish to identify her son with her
father. When the Roosevelts made their first pilgrimage to the Delano
house in Fairhaven that summer, Franklin was put to bed in the same
hand-carved hooded cradle in which his grandfather had slept seventy-
three years before but facing its foot so that he would not bump his
head. Warren Delano eventually had seventeen grandchildren; none
of the others was ever permitted to sleep in his old cradle.

Looking back on Franklin Roosevelt's boyhood, Sara's sister Dora
once said that "he was brought up in a beautiful frame." Certainly
everything about his infancy seemed calculated to make him feel loved.
His mother constantly carried and held him. She fed him at her breast
for nearly a year and she fed him at the slightest sign of hunger.
"Baby went with us" became a cheerful litany in the pages of her
journal His parents took him everywhere for carriage rides along the
Hyde Park roads, to visit friends in New York, to the homes of
neighbors, to Fairhaven again for his first Thanksgiving, where every
member of his mother's clan signed a tribute to him as "one member
of the Delano family" who "although the last to arrive in the world
would . . . not prove one of the least in merit."

He returned joy for joy. He "crows and laughs all the time," his

The Very Nice Child 113

mother wrote, and his grandfather agreed. Franklin was "a very nice
child," he assured his brother for whom the baby had been named,"
. . . that is, always bright and happy. Not crying, worrying, infrac

tions."

Sara recorded nearly every detail of his development, and she noted
as well the tributes paid to him by her visitors. Mrs. Theodore Roose
velt, Sr., spent a week at Hyde Park during which, Sara wrote, "we
admired Baby" constantly; and in a letter to her son Elliott, this mother
of one future President left a vivid picture of the warmth and security
in which a second would be brought up: "While the nurse took her
breakfast I held your dear little godson and enjoyed him intensely. He
is such a fair, sweet, cunning little bright five-months-old darling baby.
Mr. Roosevelt is very proud of him and Sallie devoted and looks so very
lovely with him, like a Murillo Madonna and infant. The place is
looking very lovely. My windows are open as I write and I se.e the

lovely view up the river Sallie and I have seen each other . . . several

times this morning, tho' we do not breakfast together until 1 1 A.M.
Enticing little trays of tea, coffee or cocoa and toast and cheese to our
rooms at Eight O'Clock and you do as you please until 11.... Mr. R.
rows and sails and attends to his place . . . James is devoted to the soft
innocent baby."

Uncle Franklin and Aunt Laura visited, too u a great event," Sara
noted and "gave baby a Russian silver gilt cup, saucer and spoons."

At five months, Franklin was put into short skirts, "as he liked to
kick and feel free to move about." He had cut two teeth by the end
of his first summer, but his mother worried that he was "rather too
thin, not as fat as a baby ought to be"; he would, in fact, remain
remarkably slender until middle age. By November he was trying "to
imitate Budgy [Mr. James's white spitz] and the cats and manages to
say a semblance of papa and mama." That same autumn he was taken
to his first adult party on a nearby estate. "Baby wanted to dance," Sara
wrote. "I could hardly hold him." In May of 1883, Franklin walked
unaided for the first time and "was quite proud of his accomplish
ment."

Franklin had the bad luck to have been born at the height of the
fever of sentimentality kindled in American mothers' hearts by
Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. In emulation
of its precious hero, Franklin's mother kept him in dresses and long
curls until he was nearly six. Then she dressed him in Scottish kilts
and highland caps, and finally reluctantly permitted him to wear

114 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

miniature sailor suits. Through all of this, he yearned to put on pants
and shirts as did other boys, and to have his hair cut short. His mother
resisted as long as she could. "I still think to this day that he looked
very sweet," she wrote in 1933, "his little blond curls bobbing ... as
he ran as fast as he could whenever he thought I had designs on
combing them." When they were finally shorn "Oh, long before
they should have been" she wept and gathered up the remnants from
the floor for safekeeping.

Constantly in the company of his adoring, watchful mother, his
father, and of Mamie and Elespie, Franklin was at first painfully shy
with anyone else, even with the friendly servants who worked at
Springwood. " When I made the rounds of the house each morning he
would go with me," his mother recalled, "trotting along and chatting
over his small affairs. But when he reached the kitchen he was always
stricken dumb. He could hardly be prevailed upon to step over the
threshold, so shy was he, and he hid safely behind me when he did,
hanging his head and rolling his eyes at the fat, good-natured French
cook who tried to coax him out with little broken English endear
ments. He would not speak a word, though, and always seemed re
lieved when he left that strange and for some reason awe-inspiring
territory."

The briefest separation from his mother was frightening. In De
cember of 1883, not yet two, Franklin was left for a day at Algonac
with Mamie and his grandparents while his parents attended the New
York wedding of his godfather, Elliott Roosevelt, and the beautiful
Anna Hall. Franklin searched frantically for his mother, unable to
believe she could have left him behind. He finally found her jacket
hanging in the nursery and buried his face in it, Sara was told, crying,
"Mama! Mama!"

Three years later, when Franklin was four, the elder Roosevelts
took a rare trip without him, traveling to Mexico in Mr. James's private
railroad car. Mexico was thought unhealthy for a small child, and
Franklin was left behind again at Algonac. His parents were gone three
months. Franklin did not overtly betray his apprehension; he may
already have learned that unpleasant emotions were best kept to him
self, that "a very nice child," in his grandfather's words, was "always
bright and happy." But he spent hours alone playing with a hobby
horse he named "Mexico," and when his mother and father returned
at last and his mother got into the wagon at the Newburgh ferry
landing, he climbed up beside her, stood on the seat, and "without

The Very Nice Child 115

crying or laughing or speaking," held on to her "like a little soldier"
for all of the two-mile ride to Algonac. Franklin was "perfectly blissful
at seeing us again," Sara wrote. "He showed great feeling."

It seems curious that FDR remembered Hyde Park as "the center
of the world" during his first seven years, for even then the restive
Roosevelts rarely stayed at home for long. Mr. James had never let
Rosy's upbringing interfere with his own love of almost ceaseless
travel; Franklin would not alter it either. In 1884, for example, when
the boy was only two, the three Roosevelts spent just four months out
of twelve at Springwood, traveling often to New York City and living
for most of the year in England.

From the time he was three, Franklin spent almost every summer
on Campobello, a slender rockbound island, ten miles long, in Cana
dian waters just off the coast of Maine, on which his father had built
a big comfortable seaside cottage. Mr. James had first been attracted to
it by the splendid sailing offered by Passamaquoddy Bay; but old
friends were also buying land and building summer houses there Mr.
and Mrs. James Lawrence of Groton, Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sturgis of
Boston, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Pell of Highland Falls, New York. And
there was a plentiful supply of the sons and daughters of local fisher
men willing to help make life agreeable for the summer people. Frank
lin's earliest memories of Campobello were fearful Wild cattle were
allowed to roam the island unmolested, and FDR remembered run
ning from them in terror. But he soon learned "they were perfectly
harmless," and life on Campobello, with its walks and picnics and
yachting excursions, became a part of the serene cycle of the Roose
velts' year.

It was not so much Hyde Park, then, as what it stood for that stayed
with FDR. Just as Algonac symbolized for Sara Delano Roosevelt the
tranquillity and comfort provided by her big loving family, so Spring-
wood came to stand in her son's memory for the love and approval
showered upon him by his parents there, and wherever else they took
him x

On Easter morning in 1885, Franklin and his parents were on their
way home from England aboard the steamship Germania, two days out
from Liverpool. Franklin was three. The ship had been tossed by heavy
seas all night, and Mr. James had just come back to the cabin from
breakfast with the captain to say that Sara should not take Franklin on
deck. The ocean was too rough. At that moment the ship seemed to

116 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

plunge beneath the sea. Everything went dark and the Roosevelts
could hear the steerage passengers shouting in terror.

"We seem to be going down," Mr. James said.

"It does look like it," Sara remembered answering. James went
above to see what had happened. Franklin and Sara watched from their
berths as water began to trickle in from underneath the cabin door.
After what seemed a very long time, Mr. James returned. The ship was
foundering. A great wave had broken over her, washing one sailor
overboard, ripping five lifeboats from their davits, tearing a hole in the
bulkhead of the ladies reading room directly above their cabin. One
woman had been lifted off her feet by the rushing water and hurled
against the opposite wall; her clothing caught on a coat hook and she
hung there, shrieking, until other passengers cut her down. All the
pumps were going. The stewards were bailing with pails, but the
captain could not be found.

There was a steady rush of water above their heads now, and the
trickle beneath the door had become a deepening pool, sloshing back
and forth with every new wave that slammed into the helpless ship.

"I never get frightened," Sara said years later, "and I was not then."
But as the water edged up the cabin wall and wet the hem of her fur
coat, she took the heavy garment down from its hook and wrapped it
around her son.

"Poor little boy," she said to her husband. "If he must go down,
he's going down warm."

A bright toy floated on the surface of the rising water. "Mama!
Mama!" Franklin shouted. "Save my jumping jack!" Sara leaned out
from her berth to save him, too.

The Germania did not sink. The captain who had been knocked
senseless and wedged beneath a sofa in the chart room by the first wave
resumed command. The water never reached the boilers, and the
battered ship was finally able to make her way back to Liverpool.

But the assurance offered by his father's imperturbability, his
mother's warm coat, and the sight of his mother reaching down to
rescue his bobbing toy were among Franklin Roosevelt's earliest and
most comforting memories.

So far as we know, only one other untoward event marred the
placid surface of Franklin Roosevelt's first seven years. Unlike the close
call aboard the Germania, it seems permanently to have affected him.

The Very Nice Child 111

President Roosevelt was about to begin his biweekly press confer
ence on December 14, 1933. As reporters crowded into the Oval
Room to take their places before his big cluttered desk, he lit a ciga
rette. A cascade of glowing ashes fell onto his suit and startled him.
Slapping at the sparks, he tried to joke away his obvious alarm.
"Every President is used to playing with fire," he said. "You won't
burn up. When I was two years old I was discovered on the floor
playing with matches. Perhaps that was a prophecy." The confer
ence went forward.

But FDR was in fact deeply afraid of fire. Since almost nothing
else seemed to frighten him he had not even ducked when a mad
man fired several pistol shots at him in Miami in 1933 those closest
to him often wondered about it. Most probably came to agree with
his eldest son, James, who believed that his father had "developed a
dread of fire" after he had been afflicted with infantile paralysis in
middle age. FDR's immobility may have intensified his fear, but the
dread itself predated his crippling by many years. Its roots are un
known, of course, but it is interesting that when the President saw
sparks smoldering on his clothing his mind rushed back to his second
year. He may have played with matches then and been caught at it,
as he said, but there is vivid evidence that year of a far more shatter
ing encounter with fire.

On Saturday, July 19, 1884, Fred and Annie Hitch returned to
America from China. Sara, Mamie, and Franklin, then two, hurried
down to Algonac to greet them. Only one Delano child still lived at
home: Kassie had left to marry Charles A. Robbins the spring after
FDR was born, and twenty-year-old Fred, a Harvard junior, was off
in the Pennsylvania coalfields learning the anthracite business as his
father had directed.

Laura Delano at nineteen was perhaps the loveliest of the Delano
sisters; even Sara liked to wash and brush her long silken hair. And she
adored her nephew; there is a photograph made at Algonac earlier that
summer in which she lies on the grass in a flowered dress, her body
curved protectively around Franklin, beaming at him as he peers at the
camera.

"She is a good deal of a little witch," her father had written when
Laura was a small girl, "and don't like to study. . . . She is wilful,
daring and persistent but loving and affectionate and she knows it,
beautiful." He alternately indulged and tried to discipline her, and

118 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

his fondness sometimes took curious forms. When her dog died,
he took it to a Newburgh taxidermist who promised to "mount his
skin and give back to Laura the portrait of 'Tip' in a sitting
posture."

She looked especially lovely the evening the Hitches came home,
Sara remembered, standing in the Algonac doorway as their carriage
drew up, wearing a summer dress of white muslin with a deep pink
sash. A homecoming dinner followed the Hitches had returned to
stay and the next day the whole family was to attend church to
gether.

All were getting dressed at nine o'clock the following morning
when they heard an explosion followed by a scream. Both came from
Laura's room on the third floor of the tower. She had been wearing
a thin wrapper as she heated her curling irons over an alcohol lamp;
somehow, the lamp was knocked over. Burning alcohol sprayed her
robe. Her door banged open, her horrified father wrote later, and
"Laura flashed down the stairway a cloud of fiery flame." Fred Hitch
happened to be standing in the hall and tried to stop her, but she
brushed past him, screaming in her panic. He snatched up a woolen
rug and ran after her, out from under the porte cochere and onto the
green oval of lawn around which the driveway coiled. There, Sara
wrote, he "caught her , . . and managed to lay her down" and smother
the flames. Sara herself raced behind with another rug, "but I wonder
Fred could catch her for she flew. " "The household followed," Mr.
Delano recalled, "and with oil and cotton and blankets sought to
alleviate the agony of the sufferer who was at last got into the house
and upon her bed."

The doctor was called and came within half an hour. A nurse was
summoned from New York City. Laura was given morphine. But
nothing could be done. Only her lovely face and neck were untouched
by the flames. She did her best to mask her pain. Like Sara, she had
been taught not to worry others. Laura was "brave and patient [ajjd]
courageous," Mr. Delano wrote, "reassuring everyone" especially
her father that 'I am young and strong and shall get all over this.' "
She was concerned that news of the accident not upset her brother
Warren's wife, Jennie, now pregnant again. She fell into a coma late
in the day and died early the next morning.

Five of Warren and Catherine Delano's children were now dead.
"All is mystery," their grieving father wrote.

The Very Nice Child 119

We do not know how much of all this Franklin knew or con
sciously remembered; he is not recorded as having ever mentioned
Laura Delano's terrible death. Mamie presumably sheltered him from
all that she could. But he may have seen his aunt's fiery plunge down
the stairs, and he could not have missed hearing her screams. The hours
that followed were his first experience of sorrow. 2

Franklin Roosevelt was sixteen months old in the spring of 1883
when he was taken to a Poughkeepsie portrait studio to be photo
graphed with his father for the first time. The slender little boy, wear
ing curls that do not yet quite reach the lace collar of his dress, perches
a little nervously on Mr. James's shoulder; one small fist holds a tired
rose; the other rests on his father's head, ready to grasp his hair. On
the little finger of the big broad hand that steadies him is a bloodstone
ring. FDR would later wear that ring on his own left hand every day
of his adult life. And when the air around Hyde Park first turned crisp
and cold in the fall, he liked to dress himself in a brown tweed suit
before setting out in his automobile to survey the woods and fields that

2. Roosevelt's early fear of fire got plenty of firsthand reinforcement. There were at least
three small but frightening fires at Springwood during his youth. On January 16, 1899, he and
the farm superintendent had to tear up part of the floor in the parlor to drown a blaze in the
cellar beams, and just a few weeks later at Groton School, he helped man a bucket brigade that
tried without success to save the burning stable. It was "a horrible scene," he told his parents,
"the poor horses . . . lying under the debris with their hide entirely burned off and fearfully
charred," all because "there was no back door, " At Harvard in 1901 he watched the two top floors
of Trinity Hall burn out of control, and later campaigned hard for dormitory fire escapes as editor
of the Crimson. When he and his mother enlarged Springwood in 1915 he insisted that the new
walls be fireproof. (Sixty-seven years later, in 1982, that decision was credited with having helped
confine still another potentially devastating blaze largely to the attic.) Even so, as late as 1944
FDR was still so worried as to how he might get out of his bedroom in case of fire that Eleanor
Roosevelt commissioned a young serviceman with architectural training to draw up plans for a
curious chute arrangement down which the President could slide unaided; the record is unclear
as to whether it was ever built, but the drawings for it are filed with the Secret Service Papers
at the FDRL.

Another fire razed Algonac itself in 1916. It was rebuilt by the Delano family (minus
its handsome tower), then sold after Frederic Delano's death in 1946, and its lands divided up
among developers. The reconstructed house remains on Susan Drive in the Newburgh
suburb of Balmville, and the driveway still twists around the grassy oval on which Laura fell
in flames, and passes beneath the porte cochere from which Sara and Mr. James drove away
to start their lives together. But the once-splendid views of the river are interrupted by the
foliage and tract houses that have grown up over the intervening years, and the house and
its big old trees now seem oversized for the site on which they stand. When the author
paid an unannounced visit one summer afternoon in 1983, an elderly maid with a European
accent answered the door. She was unaware of any of the history that had happened in the
house.

120 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

had once belonged to his father. That suit, too, had belonged to Mr.
James, made for him in Scotland half a century before, and later altered
to fit his son. 3

These were only the outward signs of FDR's affectionate memories
of his father, and perhaps of a desire to emulate him as well. Franklin
and his father had eighteen years together, but because Mr. James died
before his son was fully grown, and because he was so much older than
his wife, he has often been portrayed as a sort of fond but distant
grandfather, preoccupied and frail. That impression is only partly
accurate; Mr. James was never distant, and for the first half of their lives
together, at least, he and Franklin were vigorous and almost insepara
ble companions.

"Franklin never knew what it meant to have the kind of respect for
his father that is composed of equal parts of awe and fear," Sara Delano
Roosevelt wrote, perhaps remembering the intimidating presence of
her own father. "The regard in which he held him, amounting to
worship, grew out of a companionship that was based on his ability to
see things eye to eye on mutual tastes, and his father's never-failing
understanding of the little problems that seem so grave to the child
who is faced with them. His father never laughed at him. With him,
yes often. They were such a gay pair when they went off on long
rides together. But Franklin's tragedies became his father's woes, and
I've often marveled at his success at stifling a very natural merriment
over some of our son's minor disasters."

Mr. James was fifty-four when his second son was born, thickening
at the waist and subject to various ills; still, he did his best to act far
younger, and seems to have spent even more time with Franklin than
he had with Rosy. Even Franklin's nickname for his father "Popsy"
implied more intimacy than awe. Mr. James passed on intact his own
fondness for the outdoors. He loved trees, for example, knew their

3. To FDR, his father's old suit evidently represented frugality as well as filial loyalty. In
1938 he wrote to a Scottish friend about it: "In 1878 my father had a tweed suit made in
Edinburgh that was four years before I was born. He wore the suit constantly until his death
in 1900. 1 inherited it and wore it steadily until 1926, when I passed it on to my boy James. He
still has it and wears it in the winter time when he is in the country. A good example of Scotch
craftsmanship aided and abetted by Dutch thrift."

At FDR's own death, the ring he and his father had both worn was willed to his son James,
who wears it on the little finger of his right hand.

Sources: FDR to Arthur Murray in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., FDR: His Personal Letters, 1928-
1945, II, pages 781-782; interview with James Roosevelt.

The Very Nice Child 121

varieties, would allow none to be cut unless they were dead or diseased,
and he made sure his son felt the same way.

He took the boy sledding before he was two, taught him to ride
and row and skate and man an iceboat and, when the time came, to
shoot as well. Sometimes he overdid it. Tobogganing with Franklin in
1888, "dear James strained his knee," his wife noted, "and I had to call
the men to drag him up the hill."

Despite that uncharacteristically careless moment, Mr. James was
good at all these things, and he sought lovingly to impart his easy
mastery to his son. By the summer of 1888 he had taught Franklin at
least the rudiments of sailing his big yacht; there is a photograph made
off Campobello that summer in which the little boy tensely holds the
wheel in a stiff breeze; the wheel is nearly as tail as he, but at six
Franklin Roosevelt is already at least momentarily in command.

Horses were still at the center of Springwood life. One of Frank
lin's most vivid early memories was of watching workmen build his
father's splendid new stables in 1886; its tower stood three stories
above his mother's rose garden and was topped with a copper weather
vane boldly marked with James Roosevelt's initials.

At four, Franklin was riding out each morning with his father, just
as Rosy had thirty years before, while Mr. James directed the work on
the place. His men tipped their hats to their employer, and to Master
Franklin riding next to him on his fat Welsh pony, "Debby." By the
time he was eight, wearing tall boots and a sailor suit, he rode well
enough to accompany his father on a twenty-mile ride to Algonac
without tiring.

To a small boy, Mr. James's daring must have seemed heroic. The
Great Blizzard of 1888 buried Springwood in snow. The Albany Road
was obliterated and food in the big house ran low. Franklin never
forgot watching through the front window with his worried mother
as his father mounted "Doolittle," his favorite horse and the last of his
trotters, and set out into the white silence in search of supplies. The
big horse sank to its shoulders, but Mr. James urged him slowly for
ward up the long invisible driveway, across the road, as far as the gate
to the Roosevelt farm. There he was met by his farmer, John Irving,
who had shoveled his way along the top of the stone wall, and handed
over a sack containing milk, eggs, cheese, and a pair of chickens,
enough to get his employers through until his men could clear the
roads.

In the autumn, the Dutchess County Hunt often met at Hyde Park.

122 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Mr. James was an organizer of the club, and hunt breakfasts were
sometimes served at Springwood. Women and children in carriages
waited along the road to watch as the long line of riders rushed past
them in the distance, coursing across the fields and jumping the fences
behind their yelping hounds. Young Franklin ached to ride alongside
his father and one year disobeyed his parents and took after the hunt,
arriving at the kill with his pony in a lather. His father ordered him
home, less because he had been disobedient than because he had over
tired his mount. There were always rules to be observed, even when
amusing oneself,

Mr. James's air of benevolent but unquestioned authority extended
well beyond Springwood. In fact, everywhere Franklin was taken
throughout his boyhood, his father seemed set apart, in charge: to the
village of Hyde Park, where Mr. James had been supervisor and now
served as head of the school board; to St. James Church, where he was
senior vestryman and collected the offering each Sunday; to the Hud
son River State Hospital, just down the road on the site of his old
home, Mount Hope, where he acted as unpaid manager. Here his son
saw him genuinely rattled for almost the only time in his dignified life.
While inspecting the wards, Mr. James had come upon a harmless but
persistent old woman who believed herself Queen Victoria; she chased
him down the corridor under the delusion that he was Prince Albert,
come to take her home to Windsor.

When Franklin traveled with his father beyond New York as he
and his mother often did they rode in Mr. James's private car, the
MonoUj with its separate bed and sitting rooms fitted out in brass and
mahogany, and were waited upon by a deferential black cook-porter
named William Yapp. Even the tracks of the Delaware & Hudson and
the Louisville, Albany & Chicago over which the Monon clicked be
longed to Mr. James, in a manner of speaking; he was a director of both
lines and would eventually become their president. The Roosevelts
traveled to Canada several times, stopping to inspect the handsome
steamboats the Delaware & Hudson indirectly operated on Lakes
George and Champlain, and they went west to the up-and-coming
port of Superior, Wisconsin, where Mr. James had invested heavily in
a business block and row of town houses called "Roosevelt Terrace,"
in the apparent hope that Superior was about to eclipse Chicago.

At age seven, in August of 1889, Franklin was again taken to
England. "The dear little man" was running a temperature when the

The Very Nice Child 123

Adriatic set sail, his mother noted, and did not feel at all well; but Dr.
Parker had assured her that the boy had simply picked up a slight fever
while swimming in the Hudson; a sea voyage would be just the thing
to "break it up." Two days out, the ship's doctor diagnosed typhoid
fever. The special care and treatment Franklin then received (and
which both he and his parents evidently assumed was his due) must
have heightened his sense of his family's importance, and of his own.
The ship's captain gave him his own "large airy room on deck"; his
mother never left it during the crossing except to change her clothes,
and once to attend church services, praying for "darling Franklin"
while "his dear papa and Ellen" watched the patient. At Queenstown,
the captain wired ahead to have his own cousin, a Dr. Gemmell, and
a trained nurse meet the boat at Liverpool. Sir Thomas Ismay, founder
of the White Star line and an old friend of Mr. James, dispatched a
special tender to ferry Franklin ashore. A carriage took the pale little
boy on his mattress to the doctor's own home, where he lived for
several weeks, receiving round-the-clock attention. The captain of the
Adriatic came to call; Sir Thomas sent fresh flowers daily; his partner
sent fresh milk.

Franklin got better slowly. His temperature fell He graduated
from "cold boiled milk" to "chicken tea" to bread and milk laced with
a little port (which he told his mother was deliciously "fruitful"). He
played with paper cutouts and a basin filled with toy ducks, and by
November 5 was well enough to travel with his parents to Pau, where
he and Mr. James rode together each morning, Franklin on a small
pony named "Coquette" whose frenzied gallop precisely matched the
pace set by the gentle canter of his father's big horse, "Gigi."

In 1892 and again in 1893, the Roosevelts would journey to Chi
cago, to visit the site of the World's Columbian Exposition. Even
there they were treated as important personages; Mr. James was an
alternate commissioner to the fair from the State of New York. On
their first visit, when Franklin and his father and mother stepped
down from the Monon, FDR recalled, "a delightful old gentleman
with one of those flowering bell-shaped coats and a whip in his left
hand, and a shiny black top-hat on his head stepped forward and
. . . said to my father, 'How do you do, Cousin James.' Well, he was
a Roosevelt, too . . . the head of one of the livery stables of those
days, and dressed accordingly." Candidate Roosevelt told this tale to
a Chicago crowd during the 1932 presidential campaign in order to

124 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

create some sort of historical link with his midwestern listeners, but
the point of the story within the Roosevelt family, of course, had
originally been amused wonderment that so unexalted a man could
be even a very distant cousin.

The company his mother and father kept, at home and abroad, and
to whom Franklin was routinely introduced, offered further proof of
their social standing. By the time he was ten, he had met Mark Twain;
Dom Pedro, the exiled emperor of Brazil; Queen Victoria's daughter
Helena, the wife of Prince Christian of Holstein; and the Duke and
Duchess of Rutland.

In the winter of 1887, the Roosevelts spent eight weeks in Wash
ington. Mr. James's friend Grover Cleveland had been elected Presi
dent in 1884, the first Democrat in twenty-eight years, and Roosevelt
money had helped. In gratitude, the President offered Mr. James sev
eral diplomatic posts abroad, all of which he declined; even appointive
office was not for him. But the family's sojourn in the capital provided
"two months of very gay, pleasant life," Sara noted, "constant dinners
and charming people. Everyone has been charming to us, and even
Franklin knows everybody."

Toward the end of their stay, Mr. James took five-year-old Franklin
to the White House with him to say goodbye to the President. The
massive, weary chief executive placed his own huge hand on the boy's
head. "My little man," he said with utter seriousness, "I am making
a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the
United States."

Sara Delano Roosevelt was once asked if she had always thought
her son would grow up to be President. "Never, oh never!" she
answered. Her ambition for him had been loftier, she said: "The high
est ideal I could hold up before our boy to grow to be like his father,
straight and honorable, just and kind, an upstanding American."

All her long life, Sara would pour her formidable energies into
making sure Franklin reached that goal. At some unknown date before
her husband's death in 1900, she destroyed her journals for the years
1884 to 1887. No one now knows why. It has been suggested that the
Roosevelts had adopted sexual abstinence as the only certain way to
avoid a second and possibly fatal pregnancy, and that some evidence
of the marital strains that decision is likely to have caused might have

The Very Nice Child 125

found its way onto the otherwise uniformly discreet pages of the
diary. 4

Certainly no one observing the Roosevelts together could detect
any difficulty. The artist Felix Moscheles spent several weeks at
Springwood working on a portrait of Mr. James; his wife wrote that
"they are a most attractive couple, so cultivated and refined and, a
thing I love to see, always devoted to each other."

In any case, something happened then which she did not wish to
remember. We may never know what it was, but if it did imply a loss
of intimacy between her and her husband, that might offer an addi
tional motive for Sara's undiminishing absorption in the life of her son.
Still young and beautiful and energetic in her early thirties, but mar
ried to a much older man whom she could still revere but no longer
physically love, she may have found an emotional release in directing
the life of the little boy who still depended on her.

No moment of Franklin's day was unscheduled or unsupervised.
Up at seven. Breakfast at eight. Lessons from nine to noon. An hour
in which to play, then lunch and more lessons till four. Two more
hours to play games of which his mother approved. Then supper at six
and bed by eight. Day after day.

There was no such thing as privacy. His mother oversaw every
thing, followed him everywhere. Staying at Algonac one weekend, he
wrote an exultant letter home to his father: "Mama left this morning,
and I am to take my bath alone!" He was then eight and a half years
old, and had never bathed by himself. Nor is there any reason to think
his mother did not reappear at his tub-side when she got back. It was
a parent's mission, she said, to keep a child's mind "on nice things, on
a high level."

Within the rather special limits of the life they led, Sara and Mr.
James did their best to teach their son self-reliance and responsibility.
He was not given an allowance except when traveling; "money was
never discussed at home," his mother explained, and besides, "living

4. Dr. Nona Ferdon proposed this explanation for the missing journals in a letter to me in
1983. She may well be right, but it should be pointed out for the record that the privacy of Mrs.
Roosevelt's diaries was always relative. The Roosevelts (like the elder Delanos) sometimes took
turns noting events; Mr. James, for example, alone kept the diary for several weeks after FDR
was born and took over again later that spring when Sara became ill. Thus an indiscretion in
its pages, particularly one touching upon the most intimate relationship between them, would
seem surprising. After her husband's death, Mrs. Roosevelt evidently discussed the missing pages
with her son, still a freshman at Harvard, for on January 18, 1901, she wrote to him, "You were
right. Why did I destroy any [of my journals], bad as they are, the record of dear papa's life!"

126 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

as we did in the country there was little opportunity for spending it
... all his books and toys were provided for him." But before he could
have his first pony or the red setter "Marksman," a gift from his uncle
Warren Delano and the earliest in the succession of big rangy dogs that
romped through his boyhood, he had to promise to feed and care for
it himself.

And he was expected always to evidence the breeding and good
manners of a gentleman; it was the mark of his class, an example he
owed to those less fortunate than himself. An Englishman who had
taken afternoon tea with his own daughter and young Franklin at a
German hotel remembered all his life the polite gravity with which the
little American insisted on paying for their treat.

Raised among adults without rivals his own age, it was assumed
that he would act like an adult, would exhibit what his mother called
"a kind of kinship with older people" that other children, handicapped
by clamorous brothers and sisters, found impossible to achieve. Chil
dren, she believed, u had pretty much the same thoughts as adults"; all
they lacked was a large enough vocabulary with which to express
them. Literature would provide that. She had seen no need to supervise
Franklin's reading, his mother once explained; Springwood was filled
with good books and, besides, he had access to no others. But she read
aloud to him daily, and was irritated whenever his attention seemed
to wander. Swiss Family Robinson, the story of a shipwrecked family
whose survival depends on the virtue and omniscience of its patriarch,
was the special favorite of both mother and son; she read it to him
twice.

Hers was a loving, even adoring autocracy, but an autocracy,
nonetheless. And the very gentleness with which it was administered
smothered even the possibility of natural boyish rebellion.

Franklin displayed his first recorded sign of resistance at three,
aboard the British ship that brought the family home after the Ger-
mania nearly went down. Sitting with his parents at luncheon in the
dining salon, he raised a tumbler to his mouth as if to take a drink and
instead bit off a large jagged chunk of glass. His mother fished the shard
from his mouth, marched him out onto the deck, and hurled the
fragment into the sea. For days afterward, she said later, she was
haunted by the thought of what might have happened had it "punc
tured his little windpipe."

"Franklin," she asked when she was sure no harm had been done,
"where is your obedience?"

The Very Nice Child 127

"My 'bedience," said the little boy, "has gone upstairs for a walk."
And to prove it, when he and his mother had returned to the table, he
picked up a second glass and pretended to bite off another piece.

He was not physically punished for this breach of good behavior;
his mother thought it merely "impish." Nor was he ever spanked for
any other, so far as we know. "We never subjected the boy to a lot of
don'ts," his mother wrote, "and while certain rules established for his
well being had to be rigidly observed, we were never strict merely for
the sake of being strict. In fact we took a secret pride in the fact that
Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling."

Disapproval or the threat of it was the gentle but effective weapon
that kept him in check. His mother was never angered by what he did,
just disappointed; she needed to tell him only how he had let her down
and, worse, how sad his busy father would be to learn of it, to have
him promise to mend his ways. And when he needed to be spoken to
about some indiscretion, his mother always took pains to chastise him
out of the hearing of others. "Any fault-finding I needed to do had to
be conducted when there was no possibility of being overheard, either
by Ellen ... or Elespie. . . . They worshipped him blindly and would
not admit, even over our protests, that their little charge could be
improved upon. I remember coming to Elespie one day when I had
been brought some rather disquieting accounts of Franklin's behavior,
and saying, 'Elespie, I hear our boy has been misbehaving.' 'They tell
me/ she hedged, 'that he has faults, but I cannot see them.' "

The servants indulged him even when he climbed the back stairs
to their rooms to play Old Maid. If they won he would lose his temper,
his mother admitted, and could only be calmed when his opponents
would agree to "remove the stigma of the name, the meaning of which
he did not even comprehend at that time."

"They would always give him his way," his mother continued,
"but not so his 'Mummie,' who took quite another view." When he
was four, she recalled, and she was playing with him a board game
called "Steeplechase," she won twice in a row. He demanded that she
turn over to him "your horse; it's a better horse." She gave it to him,
rolled the dice and won again. "This crowning humiliation was not
to be borne, and he sulked in furious silence. Quietly I picked up the
toys and told him in as firm a tone as I could muster that, until he
learned to take a beating gracefully, he could not play any games again.
I dare say I was thought rather a hard disciplinarian at that time, but

128 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

it was the last indication anyone ever saw of a lack of sportsmanship
in Franklin."

Mr. James seems to have been content to leave what little disciplin
ing was needed to his wife, though he did sometimes think she
"nagged" the boy too much, and was privately amused at the serious
ness with which she took her maternal role, calling Sara "The Mother"
in at least one letter to his son some years later.

At eight, Franklin would try again to assert his independence. Sara
told the story:

"One day ... we noticed that [Franklin] seemed much depressed
and bound, do what we would to amuse him, not to be distracted from
his melancholy. Finally, a little alarmed, I asked him whether he was
unhappy. He did not answer at once, and then said very seriously 'Yes,
I am unhappy.'

"When I asked him why, he was again silent for a moment or two.
Then with a curious little gesture that combined entreaty with a
suggestion of impatience, he clasped his hands in front of him and
exclaimed, 'Oh, for freedom!'

"It seems funny now, but at the time I was honestly shocked. For
all he was such a child, his voice had a desperate note that made me
realize how seriously he meant it.

"That night I talked it over with his father. . . . We agreed that
unconsciously we had probably regulated the child's life too closely.
Evidently he was quite satisfied with what he did with his time but
what worried him was the necessity of conforming to given hours.

"So the very next morning I told him that he might do whatever
he pleased that day. He need obey no former rules nor report at given
intervals, and he was allowed to roam at will. We paid no attention to
him, and, I must say, he proved his desire for freedom by completely
ignoring us. That evening, however, a very dirty, tired youngster came
dragging in. He was hungry and ready for bed, but we did not ask him
where he had been or what he had been doing. We could only deduce
that his adventures had been a little lacking in glamour, for the next
day, quite of his own accord, he went contentedly back to his routine."

And his mother returned determinedly to hers.

Thereafter, he would be free only in his imagination, commanding
a phantom ship from a crow's nest made of nailed-together boards
jammed into the branches of a tall hemlock just outside the rose garden,
or trying to construct a raft on which he hoped to sail across the
Hudson. (It sank three feet from shore, to his mother's quiet amuse-

The Very Nice Child 129

ment.) But Franklin did find one way in which at least to seem to be
on his own. One afternoon he climbed into the top of one of his father's
giant trees and sat there gleefully silent while darkness fell, watching
as the servants and his worried mother called for him from far below.

Saturday, May 17, 1884, had been an unusually crisp spring day at
Hyde Park, and when Franklin, Mamie, and his mother hurried across
the south lawn early that evening, they were warmly dressed. A gently
curved path was always kept open through the woods, and the party
of three moved along it as fast as Franklin, not yet three, could manage.
A big bracketed red house stood at the end of the path, and a tree-lined
avenue ran back to it from the Albany Road and formed an oval before
the front door.

A small crowd was already waiting there when the Roosevelts
arrived, and just as they reached the front steps they heard the cheerful
blast of a coaching horn and turned to see a handsome four-in-hand
turn into the white gates and start down the avenue toward them,
gravel spattering from beneath its bright red wheels. Two matched
bays galloped in the lead; behind them came a pair of dapple grays. The
swaying coach itself was white, its details and undercarriage painted
scarlet. Several gentlemen in green cutaways and tall gray hats sat on
top. One of them, Franklin saw, was his father. But as the coach
thundered closer, he saw that the driver was familiar, too. He, too,
wore a gray hat; his red-brown mustache was waxed, his beard neatly
sculpted. He held the reins with one yellow-gloved hand, and with the
other expertly flicked a long whip here and there to make his teams
wheel, then slow, in perfect tandem. As soon as the lathered horses
came to a complete stop, he handed the reins to a liveried groom and
bounded down, tearing off his gloves to shake hands with Franklin and
his mother.

This was Rosy James Roosevelt Roosevelt Franklin's dashing,
exuberant half brother, who lived part of each year with his wife and
two children in the house next door to Springwood. He was one of
the dozen best amateur coachmen in America; all of his passengers
except Mr. James were fellow members of the Coaching Club of New
York who were to spend the weekend with him at Hyde Park.

Rosy is mostly forgotten now, and even during his lifetime many
thought him a showy relic of an earlier age; Eleanor Roosevelt once
dismissed him as "a terrible snob." But he was a fond, avuncular
presence throughout much of Franklin Roosevelt's youth, and he pro-

130 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

vided his far younger half brother with a vivid and instructive example
of what wealth without ambition could make of a man.

In order to understand what FDR became, it is helpful to under
stand what he might easily have been instead.

By the time Franklin was born, Rosy had become very rich indeed,
a leader of the most extravagant sporting segment of New York soci
ety. That society had changed greatly since his father was a young
man. The old Knickerbocker families had begun to be eclipsed by new
clans with new money. The Vanderbilts were prominent among the
newcomers; so were the Whitneys and the Belmonts. But the greatest
of these and the first were the Astors. The Roosevelts and Delanos
were well off. The Astors were rich beyond imagining. John Jacob
Astor, the German-born founder of the fortune, had been cunning,
avaricious, and crude. "He ate his ice cream and peas with a knife,"
a visitor remembered, and when he had finished his meal he wiped his
greasy fingers on the tablecloth. Society never interested him at all, and
in his old age, when he grew bored at one of the ostentatious occasions
his many descendants liked to arrange, he would sometimes remove his
chewing tobacco and with it "absently trace watery patterns on the
window pane." What did interest him was making money, first from
furs and then from rents on great chunks of New York real estate. He
may have been the first true American millionaire, and when he finally
died at eighty-four in 1848, he had amassed some twenty million
untaxed dollars a sum one obituary writer termed "as incomprehen
sible as infinity," but which his son and grandsons multiplied many
times.

By the early 1870s, precisely who belonged in society and who did
not had become a matter of serious concern for the wealthy and well
connected of New York. Where once there had been only John Jacob
Astor, the new age of railroads and steel and speculation had created
scores of new millionaires with wives and offspring eager to be recog
nized. Clearly, society would have to change with changing times, but
how to separate the right sort of newcomer from the merely aspiring?

Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William Astor and grand-
daughter-in-law of the founder, took it upon herself to decide. She had
four daughters who would soon be of marriageable age, and she was
determined that they encounter only the proper sort of suitor. Her
own resolution and her complacent husband's money helped make her
the Mrs. Astor, final arbiter of New York and Newport society for
nearly forty years, but she could also call upon the promotional and

The Very Nice Child 131

social skills of Ward McAllister, a mincing social climber from Georgia
who took the planning of cotillions and table settings with immense
gravity. It was his shrewd notion that Mrs. Astor give a subscription
ball each January, to which a select group of twenty-five "Patriarchs"
would each invite five gentlemen and four ladies. The Patriarchs' good
taste and good judgment would insure the proper mix of exclusivity
and realism, Knickerbockers with the newly wealthy. u We wanted the
money power," McAllister explained years later, "but not in any way
to be controlled by it." In this way his patroness would at once "create
and lead society."

The Patriarchs' ball was held in the art gallery of the turreted Astor
mansion at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. The room held just
400 guests, a limitation McAllister successfully turned to advantage.
"Why," he told the press, "there are only about 400 in fashionable
New York society. If you go outside that number you strike people
who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not
at ease."

Guests' wraps were taken by servants dressed in blue livery faith
fully modeled after that worn at Windsor. Mrs. Astor greeted visitors
standing before a full-size portrait of herself and covered with dia
monds, so many and so blinding that one visitor thought she resembled
an animated chandelier. The walls were banked with orchids and other
exotic flowers, and on a balcony above the waltzing guests a full
orchestra played, also dressed in Astor blue. 5

James and Rebecca Roosevelt had often attended these evenings
and others only slightly less splendid at Mrs. Astor's, and Mr. James
for a time had been one of the trusted Patriarchs. Rosy went to Mrs.
Astor's, too, and there is a studio portrait of him dressed for a fancy
dress ball held there in March of 1875. In it he wears the powdered
wig, ruffled shirt, dress sword, and silk hose of a member of the court
of Louis XIV. He seems a somewhat sturdy courtier, thick-calved and
ungainly to the modern eye, but his mother thought "he looked so
handsome."

Helen Astor, Mrs. Astor's second-oldest daughter, evidently

5. The Astors' rather special sense of their own place in the world was nicely pointed up
in March of 1 88 1 , when Theodore Roosevelt found himself dining next to Mrs. John Jacob Astor
IV, Mrs. Astor's daughter-in-law. Word had just come of the assassination of Czar Alexander
II of Russia at the hands of revolutionaries. Mrs. Astor was especially upset, TR remembered.
"Mr. Roosevelt," she said, "they are attacking us all over the world."

Source: TR recalled this exchange in a letter to his sister Bamie, August 20, 1887. Theodore
Roosevelt Collection, Harvard.

132 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

agreed. Rosy had met her while still a student at Columbia College. It
is easy to see what Helen Astor offered him. She was attractive (if
somewhat solemn) and gloriously rich. Rosy worked hard to win her.
He was taking "Miss Astor" for long carriage rides at least four years
before they became engaged in 1876.

What she or her mother saw in him is somewhat harder to
assess. He came from a fine old family, of course, and would provide
the Astors with a link to Knickerbocker New York, and he had perfect
manners and a great deal of charm. "He was always having a good
time, always smiling," a cousin remembered, "very much in demand
wherever he went." But he had no plans to support himself. The
sheltered, timid little boy who had slept in his parents' bedroom until
the age of ten and been terrorized at first by his one brief brush with
school in Dresden, had grown up utterly unprepared to make his own
way outside Springwood's friendly walls. All his life he would hide his
hypochondria and his fear of ordinary people and of competition in
the everyday world behind an elegant, affable fagade. He was bright
enough, graduating from Columbia with honors in 1876, and he ex
pected to go to law school, but, like his father, he had no real wish or
need to practice. Nor did business interest him much. What Rosy liked
most was enjoying himself. He had adopted most of his father's more
extravagant enthusiasms blooded horses, yacht racing, riding to
hounds, hunting and fishing in Scotland, English country life but
without Mr. James's sobering sense of responsibility. Marrying into
the Astor family would insure that he could afford always to do all
these things, and more.

He and Helen were married at Grace Church in New York in
1877. Mr. James, then still a widower, attended with his mother and
other members of his family, but the newspapers focused on the Astor
women and what they wore. The bride, though hung with jewels, was
easily outshone by her mother in a Worth gown of lace and silk
brocade. "The shoulders and bosom were literally armored with dia
mond pins and pendants," one reporter noted; other large stones
flashed from her arms, ears, fingers, throat. "Her jet black hair was
arranged in puffs," the newspaper continued, "and on either end of
each puff were rosebuds of large diamonds." One thousand guests
were later served refreshments at the Astor residence.

In addition to the income on a trust fund of $400,000, Helen
brought to the marriage a Fifth Avenue mansion of her own, but when
they were not abroad, she and Rosy would spend most of their time

The Very Nice Child 133

at the relatively modest "Red House" adjacent to Springwood, lent to
them by Mr. James. Like his own father, James Roosevelt always
wanted his sons close by.

Mr. James had become a grandfather before he married Sara
Delano. Rosy and Helen had a son in 1879; he was christened James
Roosevelt Roosevelt, Jr., but was almost always called "Taddy." And
in September of 1881, while Sara was still pregnant with Franklin,
they had a second child, a daughter, whom they named Helen for her
mother,

Rosy was given a mostly honorary position with the Astor real
estate office; the real work of collecting rents was performed by sterner
hirelings. He went to the office fairly often, a member of the family
recalled, u to pick up his mail." He had his charities. For forty years he
would be a trustee of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
York, and he was for a time an officer of the Downtown Relief Bureau,
which acted as "almoner among the worthy poor in the distribution
of moneys which men in the hurry of business would otherwise give
to the unworthy."

The rest of the time most of the time he was free to do as he
pleased, and he was pleased to do very little. His life was even more
peripatetic than his father's; living in England or Scotland and later in
Bermuda always suited him better than living at home. And it was in
England that he developed his fascination for coaching, the aristocratic
hobby that came to occupy most of his waking hours and made his
Hyde Park arrivals and departures so dramatic.

Coaching was an enormously expensive exercise in selective nostal
gia. By the 1870s, railroads had replaced stagecoaches for serious trav
elers on both sides of the Atlantic. But in England, the Duke of
Beaufort, the Marquess of Blandford, and other gentlemen of leisure
had revived coaching as a sport. Its discomforts were forgotten the
brutal lurching ride over rutted roads, the mud, the bad food served
in smoky inns: Aristocratic coachmen reveled instead in the manly
camaraderie coaching trips fostered, the considerable skill required to
handle four spirited horses at a fast clip over country roads, above all,
the opportunities it offered for gorgeous display.

An Astor, Colonel De Lancey Astor Kane, was one of the first
important American whips; he imported a celebrated English coach,
the Tally Ho, in 1876 and personally drove it daily that spring from
the Hotel Brunswick on Madison Square to Arcalarius' Hotel at Pel-
ham Bridge in Westchester County and back again. Theoretically at

134 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

least, anyone with $2.50 could ride along, and for an additional half
dollar could sit on the box behind the elegantly tailored driver. The
sight of the gleaming canary yellow coach clattering past, a liveried
guard blowing his long brass horn, fascinated the public. It was the
fashion then to "ape the English," one member of society recalled, and
the Coaching Club of New York was established that same year,
ostensibly "to encourage four-in-hand driving in America," actually to
provide English-style amusement for fashionable young gentlemen
who liked horses and had nothing better to do.

For men whose wealth did not come to them through actual ability
or effort for young Belmonts and Vanderbilts and Whitneys and
Havemeyers coaching provided a kind of mastery in which they
could take pride. An anonymous American coachman who signed
himself "an old whip" captured something of coaching's appeal:
"What other sport can stand beside it? As the coachman looks down
from the box, holding well in control the four blood horses, checking
the least of their caprices, giving full play to their strength, what
general regarding the raging battle, what statesman compelling the
votes of his party, has a sense of personal authority like his? At his side
sits a friend, aiding, counselling, or learning; or it may be a lady,
relieving the strain of his work with her pleasant prattle. Behind him
are the merry spirits of the party, chatting, joking, or breathing with
full lungs the serene air of spring. ... So the landscape passes by: the
fields and the lanes and the hedgerows in blossom; and the travellers
can scarcely believe that it is anything but a dream."

When Rosy joined the club in 1881, he was already a veteran of
the back roads of France and Italy as well as England, and he took it
all with great and uncharacteristic seriousness. He drove in the annual
Club Meet, a procession of members' carriages through Central Park
and down Fifth Avenue; his wife sat next to him, her hat and dress
coordinated to complement the colors of his coach. Thousands of
ordinary New Yorkers lined the avenue to watch the coaches pass;
squads of mounted police kept the buggies and gigs of curiosity seekers
from getting too close. There were drives to Jerome Park to watch the
races, to Newport, and to the country seats of club members. For four
seasons, Rosy and several friends ran their own daily public coach from
New York to Pelham and one year even managed to make a profit,
if one didn't count in the cost of grooms or equipment.

An infinity of rules had to be observed. "It is hardly necessary to
say that a man when driving should always take off his hat to a lady

The Very Nice Child 135

of his acquaintance," wrote Rosy's friend Fairman Rogers in his ency
clopedic Manual of Coaching. "It is in bad taste merely to raise his whip
in place of so doing. If he has not hands enough to spare one for his
hat, he should continue to practice driving until he can find one." In
winter, there were repainting and repairs to the coach to be seen to,
and the latest equipment to be ordered: the finest whip handles, for
example, "rabbit-bitten hollies" saplings on which the teeth of wild
rabbits had left distinctive patterns. And at least once a year Rosy
traveled north to farms in Vermont and Maine, where he stood in the
snow and bargained for the next season's horses, twenty at a time.

His coaching, along with the stag stalking and salmon fishing that
added variety to his crowded year, left him little time to act as father
to his children, and each was affected by his frequent absence. When
ever his family was at Hyde Park, Taddy and Helen played with
Franklin. One Thanksgiving at Springwood the children presented an
after-dinner tableau; all three were then steeped in gory English his
tory, and Franklin and Taddy portrayed the Little Princes in the
Tower, noisily expiring beneath pillows held by Helen. She was high-
spirited and tomboyish, more interested in tobogganing than dolls, and
she and Franklin got on well.

He and Taddy did not. Taddy was three years older, heavier, faster,
stronger everything an only child like Franklin would find disquiet
ing in a competitor. But something also really seems to have been
wrong with him. He was sometimes uncontrollable, at others oddly
withdrawn. He was unable to concentrate on his studies; one tutor
thought him "very backward." His father believed him only "very shy
and wanting in confidence." Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of Cousin
Theodore, once complained to Franklin that Taddy could not be
stopped from pulling her hair.

Relations between the neighboring Roosevelt households were al
ways correct and sometimes cordial but also a little reserved, perhaps
complicated by the fact that Sara and Rosy were the same age. She,
at least, must have sometimes seen her son and Taddy as rivals for her
husband's affection. In that competition, she found Taddy wanting. So
did Mr. James. He did not quite approve of the frivolous life Rosy and
Helen Astor led, and he thought he saw evidence of its bad effects in
his troubled grandson.

What Rosy needed was serious work, something he might accom
plish on his own and feel good about. His father tried to provide it for
him. When, in 1887, President Cleveland asked Mr. James to serve his

136 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

government abroad, he had turned him down. But he had countered
with a request of his own: Might Rosy be appointed first secretary to
the American legation in Vienna? It would not violate family tradition
against public office, since he had himself served unofficially under
James Buchanan in the London embassy many years earlier. Rosy was
fluent in both German and French, had always been a loyal Democrat,
gave handsomely to the Cleveland campaign, and could help pay em
bassy expenses from his wife's fortune. Besides, the boy needed some
thing to do. Cleveland agreed.

The Poughkeepsie News reported that Rosy's New York friends
were astonished by the appointment: " 'Politics, did you say?' said a
member of one of the 5th Avenue clubs. 'Why, I never knew Rosy to
cast a vote. In fact, I don't think he ever troubled his head about it. But
he is a splendid fellow, for all that.' "

Rosy's first experience of gainful employment did not go as
smoothly as he or his father had hoped. Relations with the U.S. minis
ter, General Alexander T. Lawton, were cordial enough. Lawton, an
Atlanta attorney and businessman who had been badly wounded at
Sharpsburg fighting for the Confederacy, liked Rosy, seeing in him "a
gentleman by birth, education, position and habits, and possessed of a
temperament and social facilities" ideally suited to the diplomatic life.

Nor were Rosy's duties onerous. A clerk handled all the paper
work, leaving the first secretary free to interview applicants for visas,
find out what had happened to the minister's subscription to the At
lanta Constitution, give and attend formal dinners, and advise visiting
Americans on the niceties of local custom. "When going to receptions,
parties, etc.," he told one newcomer, "it is always necessary to take a
servant with one to hold coats, wraps, etc., as there is never any
cloakroom." Plenty of time was left over for Rosy and Helen to fish
nearby streams for trout and to take long drives around the city in their
four-in-hand.

Still, he was not happy. His table silver had arrived from England
"badly scratched and rubbed" for one thing, and because General
Lawton had asked him to take up his post as soon as possible after his
Senate confirmation in February, 1888, he had not been granted the
customary three-week transition period for travel. "This necessitated
my presence in Vienna during the whole of the most trying season of
the year," he complained to his superior in late August, "and forced
the residence of my family in one of the suburbs instead of any of the
more healthy country resorts further afield." Unless he was given sixty

The Very Nice Child 137

days' leave in which to travel to England and breathe "its more bracing
air" before enduring another Austrian winter, "I shall consider myself
at perfect liberty to resign my position. " The leave was granted, and
Rosy spent the autumn with his family in England, shooting grouse
and driving a brand-new blue-and-yellow coach with wheels striped
in yellow and black.

He was still there in November when he got the dispiriting news
that the Democrats had lost the presidency. Benjamin Harrison would
take office in March, and Rosy's job would presumably end shortly
thereafter. Mr. James hoped he would stay on it was so heartening
to see him holding down a responsible position and wrote to the
Republican Secretary of State designate, James G. Elaine, asking that
Rosy be retained at Vienna. His son was not pleased. He wanted to
resign, he told his father, for "If I stayed, say for a year, under the
Republicans, I should be 'neither fish nor fowl' at the end of that time.
... By Resigning ... I am in a very much better position with our party,
should they come in again in '92."

As to what he would do in the meantime, he was not sure. "I want
so much to feel that I may have something to do when I get home,"
he told his father, ". . . as I don't want to get back to the old rut I was
in before I came here." Mr. James tried to create a job for him with
West Superior Steel, and Rosy seemed pleased: "A moderate position
of that kind would suit me exactly, where the responsibility would not
be too great." But the firm was doing too poorly to add another
executive.

The new American minister arrived that spring. He was Frederick
D. Grant, the youngest son of the late Ulysses S. Grant, and not Rosy's
sort at all. "The Grants are pretty bad, " he told his father, a tho' I must
say very civil and accommodating to us." He was more blunt when
describing them to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Astor: "He [Fred Grant]
is very much like his father, without the brains but just as common.
She is rather pretty but western and provincial. The last sort of people
who ought to have been sent here!"

In August, after writing a reassuring note to his successor as first
secretary "It is considered quite enough here if a Secretary's wife has
a fiacre ... as long as she has a footman in livery on the box" Rosy
left Vienna for a short stay at Karlsbad. With him went his family,
three servants, eleven trunks, and twenty-three crates. He was thirty-
six years old and again without anything much to do, but he was not
overly concerned. Before going home to Hyde Park in the fall he

138 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

thought he might leave the children at Heathfield, his estate near
Ascot, and undertake a long coaching trip to the west coast of England.

Franklin was an only child, but he cannot really be said to have
been lonely. Other children besides Helen and Taddy came to play at
Springwood. Some were his cousins, the sons and daughters of his
mother and father's siblings, but there were unrelated playmates, too.
Like him, most were the offspring of the Hudson River gentry, those
fifty-odd well-to-do families whose elaborate country seats lay scat
tered for miles along the wooded bluffs on the eastern shore of the
river. Many were interrelated; all were well-to-do and devoted to what
Sara Delano Roosevelt once called "living life as it should be."

Their lovely stretch of the river even had its own suitably aristo
cratic tramp, a genial eccentric named Henry Madison. Although he
was hugely fat and his tattered clothes were tenuously held together
by safety pins, he claimed to be the nephew of President James Madi
son, and his air of genteel refinement forbade him even from speaking
to the other tramps he met along the road. According to FDR (who
remembered him well from his boyhood), Madison wintered each year
in Florida, courtesy of Chauncey Depew of the New York Central
Railroad, whom he apparently amused, and whose residence in Peek-
skill he always made a point of visiting.

But each summer for more than twenty years he came north again
to eat his epicurean way from Garrison to Rhinebeck, calling at the
back doors and sampling the larders of some of America's wealthiest
men. He was an annual guest in the Springwood kitchen, spinning
tales of his travels for Franklin and the servants in exchange for a good
meal. In fact, Hyde Park was one of his favorite stopping places. North
and south of there, hospitable kitchens were often separated by several
hungry miles, but in Hyde Park the great estates bordered one another,
and one hardly had to walk at all to get to the next feed. Approaching
town from Poughkeepsie along the Albany Road, Madison would first
visit the Roosevelts. But just next door less than 200 yards further
north was Bellefield, the big white home of state senator Thomas
Jefferson Newbold, who, like his old friend and neighbor Mr. James,
was a Democrat and therefore an anomaly among the river families.

Just beyond the Newbold house, set back from the road in the
midst of a vast English-style park, stood Crumwold, the still more
impressive home of Colonel Archibald Rogers, a Standard Oil official
who had married into a wealthy local family. His Romanesque castle

The Very Nice Child 139

with its seventy rooms was said to have cost $300,000 to build a sum
less startling even for that time when it was remembered that Mrs.
Rogers earned a thousand dollars a day in interest on her legacy alone.

The tiny village of Hyde Park itself next provided Henry Madison
with a few hundred yards in which to walk off luncheon at Crumwold.
The newspapers of the day invariably called it a "hamlet"; it was a
crossroads community, just a handful of modest houses, a hotel, and
several small stores, including three butcher shops that provided veni
son, game birds, and other exotic meats for the tables of the well-to-do.
Down along the riverbank, hidden from Madison as he heaved his way
northward along the road, were the railway depot and a boat landing
where supplies ordered by the estate owners could be brought ashore.

From Henry Madison's specialized point of view, perhaps the most
appealing Hyde Park mansion was also the last to be built. At the
northern edge of town, on the site of the house built by Dr. Isaac
Roosevelt's old mentor, Dr. Hosack, Frederick W. Vanderbilt had
constructed for himself a full-fledged Renaissance palace with fifty-
four rooms in 1898. He furnished it with tapestries and coffered ceil
ings and whole rooms of carved paneling ripped from the homes of
European royalty. Best of all, its staff of seventeen household servants
included a chef trained in Paris.

Franklin's closest boyhood friends lived on the estates closest to his
own: Archie Rogers, Jr. (just Franklin's age), and his younger brother,
Edmund; and pretty Mary Newbold (also his age), who lived right
next door at Bellefield. He did not choose them as other children
choose their playmates; they became his friends, his daughter Anna
once explained, simply because they "just happened to be there."

Franklin played with both Rogers boys, but Archie was his favor
ite. He rode his pony along the forest path to Crumwold to see him
almost every day. Together they dug a tunnel beneath the snow, sailed
wooden boats on the river, and learned their ABC's from a governess
in the Crumwold tower schoolroom. At seven, in March of 1889,
Franklin wrote to Archie from New York: "We are going to see
Barnom's Circus and it is going to march through the streets and we
are going to see it. ... Send love to Edmund."

The following December, Archie was dead of diphtheria. There is
no mention of the death of her son's closest friend in Sara Delano
Roosevelt's journal (nor is it marked in either her own book, My Boy
Franklin, or in Gracious Lady, her semi-official biography for which

140 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

she supplied most of the information). In the Delano tradition, un
pleasantness of any kind, even simple grief, was best forgotten or kept
to oneself. Archie Rogers' death must have affected Franklin. It offered
vivid, frightening proof that life was not always as secure and untrou
bled as Springwood made it seem. But, as with the death of his Aunt
Laura, there is no record of his ever having spoken of it to anyone.

There were other small visitors, but even Franklin's friendship
with children of whom his parents approved was strictly regulated.
None ever spent the night with him at Springwood, for example. "I
never should allow a small boy to visit a friend over night, especially
in the same town," his mother once explained. "It is always a mistake."

Isabel and Hasseltine Whitney, two small and well-bred sisters
from Paterson, New Jersey, were several times imported for the day
to play with Franklin. A cousin remembers being told that they had
not looked forward to their visits to Hyde Park. Franklin was u very
spoiled," they reported to their mother; "he did not like to share his
toys or books." To be fair, their memories may have been curdled by
subsequent dealings with FDR as President. Many years later, when
both sisters had grown old, their parents died within weeks of one
another, subjecting them to a doubled inheritance tax which they
thought unjust. The Whitney sisters had long since lost touch with
their playmate and they disapproved strenuously of his politics, but
Isabel, the eldest, now wrote to Roosevelt in the White House, remind
ing him of their old acquaintance and asking for an appointment. FDR,
to whom all such early contacts always remained important, agreed to
see her and listened patiently as she told her story. When she had
finished, he told her that he was terribly sorry, but not even the
President could alter a law enacted by the New York State legislature.
There was nothing he could do. The Whitney sisters would have to
pay their taxes. Isabel rose to her feet. "You were always a nasty little
boy," she shouted, waving her cane, "and now you are a nasty old

man!

Franklin was sometimes permitted to play outdoors with the chil
dren of his parents' employees, but his proper relationship with them
had been fixed as early as Christmas Eve in 1884, when, not yet three,
he had first helped hand out gifts to the people who worked on the
place and their children, who were permitted to come into the parlor
once each year to gaze at the tall tree lit with candles. He was especially
friendly with the stable boys, his mother remembered, because they
shared his love for horses. But both Franklin and his playmates always

The Very Nice Child 141

understood who was ultimately in charge. Once, watching from the
piazza as he told a companion precisely how their fort must be built,
his mother urged him to let the other boy give the orders some of the
time.

"Mummie," he replied, "if I didn't give the orders, nothing would
happen!" 6

Two small boys, sons of one of the Roosevelt farmers, were some
times allowed to bobsled with Franklin and his father, shouting with
pleasure as they hurtled down the steep slope behind the house. But
each time they reached the bottom, it was the brothers' task to haul the
bobsled back up the hill again while the two Roosevelts came along
behind, unencumbered.

In summer, copperheads sometimes sunned themselves in the
Springwood gardens and along the stone walls that separated the fields.
Mr. James worried that Franklin might be bitten, and offered his
employees' children a shiny new quarter for every dead snake they
showed him. The same two boys who had pulled the bobsled spotted
a snake, killed it, and carried its thick bronze body up to the house. Mr.
James paid up, and they scurried off to find another. When no snake
showed itself in two days of hunting, it occurred to the oldest boy that
displaying the original corpse might win them another quarter. It
worked a second time, but "Old Mr. Roosevelt eventually got wise,"
a descendant remembered, when the original snake "got kind of dry,"
and he imposed a new rule: Henceforth, the snake had to be left behind
after each reward. 7

There were other boys in Hyde Park, of course, most of them the
offspring of the men and women who worked on the great estates that
lined the Albany Road. They reflected the hiring preferences of their
parents' employers. The Rogers family, for example, usually hired
Scandinavians. Mr. James favored Scots. His brother John once adver
tised his blunt requirements: "Germans and Scandinavians highly

6. This familiar story, first told by FDR's mother and repeated by many of his biographers,
is often cited as an early sign of his instinct for leadership and of the willingness of his peers
to grant it to him. But his playmate was not a peer; he was "a little boy on the place," in Mrs.
Roosevelt's words, an employee's son, and presumably well schooled in the realities of power
at Springwood.

Source: Sara Delano Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin, page 26.

7. Like FDR, one of these boys was actually born in Springwood itself. His father and
mother lived there in the servants' rooms and watched over the house one winter when the
Roosevelts were in New York. Their son grew up to be a plumber and eventually moved to
Brooklyn.

Source: Nancy Fogel interviews, FDRL.

142 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

thought of; Irishmen rejected; blacks not considered." The village
children had their own brutal hierarchy. Boys and girls from outlying
farms were called "monkeys," and Staatsburg, the district from which
many of them came, was "the zoo."

In summer, the whistle of the steamboat Mary Powell was the signal
for town boys to leap on their bicycles and pedal down to the river
front to dive in and ride the swells that slapped against the landing.
When the shad ran in the spring, the same boys hurled nets from rocks
just off shore near the depot, then threw their wriggling silver catch
over their shoulders to their sisters waiting with buckets on land. Later,
the fish were salted and stored for the winter months, when boys and
girls alike bundled themselves against the wind and picked their way
along the snowy roads to school.

Franklin's contacts with this rough and tumble childhood world
were tenuous and fleeting. When his father rode into town to inspect
the public school sitting in the back of the room, a former student
recalled, his riding crop across his knees, and listening gravely as the
pupils recited Franklin waited outside with the horses.

One day at age five or six, driving with his parents along Noxon
Street in Poughkeepsie, he saw three small boys playing with a pet
rabbit in their front yard. He asked his father if he might be allowed
to pat the rabbit. The carriage stopped, and Mr. James called the boys
over with their pet. Franklin was delighted. Might he buy the rabbit?
Mr. James asked. "Oh, no, sir," the eldest boy answered. "We can't sell
them, but we will give your little boy two, as we have more." A box
was found, and the two rabbits went home to Springwood in Frank
lin's lap. The boys were named Moore, their sister wrote to remind
President Roosevelt many years later. He was sorry not to remember
them, FDR responded, but "I do remember the rabbits."

His first seven years at Springwood had taught Franklin Roosevelt
that his parents were important people and that, as their son, he was
important, too. He had learned as well that the world was for the most
part a sunny congenial place, and he had every reason to believe that
his own future would be bright with pleasures, only lightly alloyed
with duties.

When the three Roosevelts went sleighing, the sleek vehicle lined
with wine-red velvet in which they rode had been a gift from Czar
Alexander II of Russia to his friend Napoleon III, the emperor of
France. Mr. James had bought it at auction in Paris after the Commune

The Very Nice Child 143

for fifteen dollars, and the silver trappings that now sparkled on the
harness bore the Roosevelt crest.

Franklin sat by himself in the back, where the Empress Eugenie
had once ridden as she glided through the Bois de Boulogne; his
mother and father rode side by side up front to shield him from the
cutting wind.

CHAPTER

4

THE LOVING CONSPIRACY

On November 1, 1890, Sara Delano Roosevelt admitted to her diary
that she had had "quite a busy morning." The Dutchess County Hunt
was to have its hunt breakfast at Springwood that afternoon, forty
guests in all. Charles Anderson, the Roosevelts' new English butler,
was in charge; he was an able organizer, despite his blue glass eye,
which, one visitor remembered, had an "electric effect on children."
And Sara's sister, Annie Hitch, had come up from Algonac the night
before to help.

Everything was ready when the riders pounded up to the house at
twelve-thirty, exhilarated and hungry from the morning's chase. Sara
showed them to the sideboard in the dining room where the steaming
food was laid out: oatmeal, baked potatoes, mutton chops, griddle
cakes, rye muffins, coffee, and tea. No one could have told that any
thing was wrong.

But something was. Mr. James was not there. He lay in bed up
stairs, too ill even to greet his guests. Two weeks earlier he had re
turned from a week-long business trip to West Superior, Wisconsin,
and experienced what he and Sara both thought only a chill while
driving out to dinner. But pains in his chest had sent him home later
in the evening, and he had been ill off and on ever since. His doctors
were at first uncertain what the matter was. He had always been
susceptible to back pains, which he and they attributed to some sort
of kidney trouble, and for which he had often taken the waters in

The Loving Conspiracy 145

Europe. And he also suffered from frequent indigestion. But this was
different. The pain was in his chest and so severe that simple breathing
was often agony.

He had suffered a mild heart attack; the sharp recurring pains were
angina pectoris. Mr. James was just sixty-two, and would live on for
ten more years. But he would never be fully well again. That fact
altered almost every aspect of life for the Roosevelts, with profound
and lasting impact on the development of Franklin's personality. Mr.
James had always been his active, good-humored companion, as well
as his father. Now, increasingly, he would be an invalid, someone to
be cared for, not played with or relied upon. 1 The boy's strong impulse
to be what his grandfather Delano had called "a very nice child . . .
always bright and happy. Not crying, worrying, infractious" was now
intensified by the very real danger that to worry or annoy his father
was to risk further weakening his damaged heart. From 1890 on,
Franklin and his mother were brought still closer together as conspira
tors in a loving plot to keep Mr. James alive and well.

His role in that conspiracy sometimes demanded a startling degree
of stoicism. Once, while traveling with his parents aboard the Monon,
a steel curtain rod fell onto his forehead, cutting him deeply. Though
blood poured down his face, terrifying his mother, Franklin, then just
nine, insisted that Mr. James not be told, asking instead for a cap to
put on to cover the wound. He spent the rest of the day wearing the
cap and standing outside on the observation platform.

Much later, at fourteen, he was playing with a friend on the shore
at Campobello, taking turns batting pebbles out into the water with
sticks. His companion's stick slipped from his hands and smashed into
Franklin's mouth, splitting his lip, breaking one tooth, and chipping
another. He made his way up to the house but would answer his
mother's questions about what had happened only in monosyllables.
She knew something was seriously wrong and finally demanded that
he open his mouth. The nerve of the broken tooth hung down, ex-

1. Mr. James's failing health did not diminish his unquestioned supremacy within his home.
Sara may have controlled her son, but her husband like her father before him controlled her.
He was not to be challenged on matters of what he considered principle. When the three
Roosevelts visited the Chicago World's Fair for the first time in 1892, Sara encountered her
girlhood friend, Maggie Carey in the lobby of the hotel. They had not seen each other for years,
and Sara was eager to get reacquainted. But in the intervening years Maggie had shed her first
husband for a second, causing a newspaper scandal. Mr. James forbade their meeting. There were
words between the Roosevelts. "James feels so strongly on the matter," Sara wrote in her journal,
"that I give up seeing Maggie again! It is not easy to make up my mind!" Mr. James made it
up for her; she and her old friend did not meet.

Source: SDR Journal, FDRL.

146 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

posed and throbbing. Again Franklin had suffered in silence as long
as he could rather than cause alarm. Later that day, his mother noted
proudly, he endured the extraction of the nerve "without fuss."

Before 1890, European travel had been a pleasant diversion for the
Roosevelts. After Mr. James's heart attack they thought it a necessity.
Salvation, they came to believe, lay in the warm saline waters that
bubbled up naturally from several ancient springs on the northeast
slope of the Taunus Mountains in the Rhineland town of Bad Nau-
heim. It was an old city with a thriving new industry. In 1859 a local
physician had published a treatise which alleged that heart patients
could be helped by a carefully supervised sequence of warm baths in
the carbonated waters of one of the Nauheim springs. Thousands of
sufferers believed him.

The Roosevelts were first sent to Nauheim in May of 1891 by a
London specialist. They would return with Franklin four times, and
come a fifth time on their own. Their first visit there, with its unstated
but unmistakable air of anxiety, was made still more difficult for Frank
lin when fear prevented his nurse, Helen McRorie, from coming
along. She was ill herself, and the prospect of an ocean crossing
alarmed her. "The parting from her was really terrible for darling
Franklin," Sara wrote, "his good devoted 'Mamie' for nine years, all
his life in fact." But he did his best to hide his sadness.

Nauheim was a quiet resort compared to Karlsbad or Baden-Baden,
but well enough appointed for all but the most extravagant visitors.
The Roosevelts usually stayed in the same suite at the Villa Britannia,
a big expensive well-staffed hotel whose other guests were mostly
Britons. Anderson sometimes came along to see to the Roosevelts'
further comfort.

The keys to a successful cure were regular habits and patience. "Do
not become impatient; remain, drink, bathe, and you will succeed,"
one German doctor wrote. The Roosevelts dutifully complied. Drink
ing the waters of one spring was said to ease indigestion; daily baths
in the waters of another healed the heart. Mr. James did both. He rose
early every morning, made his way to the vast colonnaded Kurhaus
and joined one of the long, slow-moving lines that shuffled toward the
octagonal fountain that stood in its vaulted center. Sara always kept
him company. Each patient held his or her own porcelain cup, and
when the fountain was finally reached, a hearty young woman in a cap
and white apron turned on a burnished tap and filled the cup with

The Loving Conspiracy 147

eight ounces of warm salty water. "You hate it savagely for the first
day or two/' one patient wrote, but soon get used to it. Some sufferers
were encouraged to go back for as many as four refills, with fifteen-
minute intervals between drafts. To "promote absorption," gentle
strolls were prescribed through the adjacent park filled with flowering
horse chestnut trees, weeping willows, and formal beds of blossoms;
a full orchestra played Chopin and Mozart to make the time go faster.

Then followed an hour's promenade before breakfast. German
patients generally ate together in the garden. The Roosevelts and their
English friends walked back to their hotel to dine; according to Mr.
James, it was Sara who objected to "feeding with German swine." An
hour or so later, Mr. James went to one of the three bathhouses that
accommodated some 1,000 patients a day. There, an attendant helped
him into his own marble tub filled with dark orange water, naturally
heated to 99 degrees. His bath lasted fifteen minutes more than that
was thought counterproductive during which millions of tiny white
bubbles of carbonic gas formed on his skin. These bubbles and the
pleasant tingling sensation they produced were said to "dilate blood
vessels, relieve the heart and circulatory system, improve blood supply.
. . ." Certainly the warm, naturally buoyant water in which weary
aching limbs moved with renewed ease lent the anxious patient a sense
of euphoria and peace.

In any case, Mr. James came to believe that these baths were keep
ing him from invalidism, fending off death. Sara and Franklin believed
it, too. And when the time came many years later for Franklin to put
his faith in the restorative power of mineral waters, it is not surprising
that he did so with such energy and hope.

The rest of each day was devoted to eating (moderately, and with
as little consumption of fat as possible), leafing through Punch and the
London Times, provided free in the Kurbaus reading room, going for
graded walks in the park, and, if Mr. James was feeling especially well,
making short excursions up the wooded slopes of nearby hills. Every
effort was made to keep the patient from worries of any kind. "Do not
trouble your mind with business affairs," one physician urged; even
"excessive letter writing" was thought "decidedly pernicious" because
the excited thoughts it inspired hampered sleep. After-dinner card-
playing was also discouraged, and the Roosevelts' nightly game of
bezique had to be played in secret. In any case, they were in bed
beneath feather comforters by ten every evening.

No amount of Mozart or bright flowers could disguise the fact that

148

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

the German baths existed to treat the desperately ill. Many of the men
and women who lined up each morning with Mr. James to drink the
waters were perfectly healthy, or seemed so. Some, like Sara, were
merely accompanying the sick; others were taking the treatment as a
preventative. But, as one visitor to Karlsbad wrote, "also you see
... a sadly larger percentage of invalids, such as no kind soul could
look upon without a pang. . . . Here are half-crippled sufferers, with
pallid ghastly faces, limping to the springs on crutches, and looking as
if their next step will be into their graves." The same was true at
Nauheim. Some patients were not even well enough to stand; friends
or servants carried them on pallets or pushed them in wheelchairs.
Faces noticed one morning might not be in line the next.

Sickness and the vivid possibility of death surrounded Franklin at
Nauheim, day after day. He knew that he was never to worry his
father. Nor must he appear to be worried himself. He is not known
ever to have spoken of the sights he saw at Nauheim, but he must have
deliberately set out not to notice what was happening all around him,
not to allow himself ever to be seen to be frightened or repelled.

"Life here," one visitor wrote, "is simple and quiet to the last
degree," just what unwell adults needed, perhaps, but it cannot have
held much interest for a lively little boy. 2 Few other children stopped
at Nauheim, and of those present, most were ill themselves. Franklin
befriended at least one of these that first summer, a pale English boy,
smaller than himself and confined to a wheelchair, who spent several
hours each day listening to music in the garden. His name was John
Percival Droop, and many years later he remembered that the big
American boy had been "very kind" to him all season, and when the
Roosevelts were about to leave that September, Franklin had given him
a storybook and signed its flyleaf with a confident flourish that might
have seemed remarkable in any other nine-year-old: "To Percy from
his friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Franklin did his best to entertain himself. He had a bow and arrows
and played Indian alone in the park, and he sailed a wind-up boat his
father had bought for him at Cologne back and forth across its pond.
And he learned to swim. Mr. James was not well enough to teach him,

2. Another patient at Bad Nauheim during the summer of 1892, the second season Mr. James
and his wife and son spent there, was Livy Clemens, Mark Twain's wife, then suffering from
both a heart condition and from goiter. With her was her eighteen-year-old daughter, Clara, who
recalled that her father had christened the place "Bath No-Harm." "Certainly," Clara wrote,' "not
much benefit was evident from this cure, and the spot was none too cheerful. , . . There was
nothing to do but walk through the valley."

Source; Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain, page 113.

The Loving Conspiracy 149

so a friend, Sir Cameron Gull, did so in Spartan British style, tying a
rope around the boy's waist and throwing him into the pool suspended
from a stout pole; whenever he stayed under too long he was pulled
up till he got his breath back, then plunged in again. 3

Perhaps in part just to give him something else to do, his parents
sent him to the local Stadtschuk for six weeks that summer, just as Mr.
James had enrolled Rosy in public school in Dresden twenty-six years
earlier. If Franklin was frightened by his first contact with public
education, as his half brother had been, he let no one know of it. The
school director, Christian Bommerscheim, praised his "assiduous zeal"
to his parents, and said that he had made "brisk diligent progress" in
all his subjects. Years later, when FDR had been elected President,
Herr Bommerscheim told a reporter that he had been "an unusually
bright young fellow. He had such an engaging manner, and he was
always so polite, that he was soon one of the most popular children in
the school." It seems likely that the director meant that he had been
popular with his teachers; they were adults, after all, and Franklin
knew how much value adults placed on manners and unbroken amia
bility. But it seems unlikely that he was especially admired by his
classmates. He was a year younger than they, less than fluent in their
language, and dressed daily in a blue sailor suit at his mother's insis
tence. In any case, neither he nor his parents seem to have taken the
experiment very seriously. His mother thought it "rather amusing, but
I doubt if he learns much," and Franklin himself was dismissive when
describing the exotic experience to his young cousins Muriel and
Warren Robbins back home: "I go to the public school with a lot of
little Mickies and we have German reading, German dictation, the
history of Siegfried, and arithmetic . . . and I like it very much."

No "Mickies" are known to have come to his room to play, and
although he returned several times to Nauheim with his parents, he
never again went near the school. 4

3. When the time came for his own children to learn to swim, FDR repeated this terrifying
technique. Louis Depew, his mother's chauffeur, usually held the pole; but sometimes Roosevelt
himself took charge, shouting encouragement all the while. "It really was a wretched way to teach
you to swim," his eldest son recalled, "but it was the way Father had learned and traditionalist
that he was it was the way he was going to teach us."

Sources: Roosevelt and Shalett, page 48; and Dows, Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, page
99.

4. Some of Roosevelt's biographers have made a good deal of the political impact upon him
of his early trips abroad, and when it suited the needs of the moment FDR did, too. The bellicose
emperor Wilhelm II had been on the throne for just three years in 1891, but already every
German schoolboy was receiving instruction in map reading and military topography or so

150 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

When the Roosevelts left London for Pau after Franklin's bout
with typhoid in 1889, a Miss Buckingham had accompanied them. She
was his first governess and would remain only until the family began
to make its way home again the following spring. At least seven more
governesses and tutors followed over the next ten years. 5

Franklin liked some better than others, but knew always that none
was permanent. Like the boy they were hired to teach, governesses and
tutors looked to his parents for their authority; neither Franklin nor
his teachers ever had any doubt as to who was ultimately in charge.
They were there to teach him what he needed to know, to answer his
questions, to help him make his way. When one moved on, another
would appear, in turn to be displaced. He may have been sorry to see
one or another of them go, but it was all part of the natural scheme
of things. They were there for him; he would outlast them all.

He was not notably rebellious. He knew that his parents wished
him to study, so he did. But he was not a rigorous student, either, and
it never took much to get him out of anything he found unpleasant.

Roosevelt said he remembered. In fact, he stated in 1933 (and again in 1945) that his own
introduction to that discipline in the classroom at Nauheim had given him, his first glimpse of
the German potential for aggressive militarism. He did not, however, bother to mention that he
was studying maps when he wrote to his cousins about his studies at the time, nor did his
schoolmaster list topography among the subjects his American pupil studied while in his care.

His earlier remarks about the Germans proved embarrassing in October of 1939, when
President Roosevelt was trying hard to maintain a public posture of strict neutrality. That month
the columnist Harlan Miller wrote two lengthy and laudatory pieces on FDR's understanding
of foreign affairs, placing special emphasis on his boyhood trips to Europe. Not surprisingly,
Roosevelt found Miller's conclusion that "No other American president has ever entered the
White House with such an intimate knowledge of world politics and international stresses"
"essentially accurate."

But Ernest K. Lindley, a veteran journalist and early Roosevelt biographer who generally
admired FDR, found Miller's columns a bit much. Roosevelt had a built-in anti-German bias,
he suggested, recalling for his readers his own conversations with Roosevelt, in which FDR "had
made it plain that he did not look back upon Germany with the same friendliness that he felt
for Great Britain and France." The President was indignant, and dictated a long cutting letter
which he wanted Steve Early, his press secretary, to send out over his own signature. Lindley's
story was "essentially inaccurate," he said, and the notion that he had ever thought less of
Germany than Britain or France was "deliberate falsification." "As a matter of simple fact," he
said, "I did not know Great Britain and France as a boy, but I did know Germany. If anything,
I looked upon the Germany that I knew with far more friendliness than I did Great Britain or
France."

He did know Britain and France, however, and if he preferred Germany he successfully hid
that view from his parents, whose own scorn for Germans was unrelenting.

Sources: FDR's letter to Lindley and supporting documents, Stephen T. Early Papers,
FDRL,

5. Franklin Roosevelt's governesses and tutors and their dates of service: Miss Buckingham,
1889-90; Miss Gerver, 1890; Miss Reinsberg, 1890-91; Mademoiselle Jeanne Sandoz, 1891-93;
Miss Alice Clay, 1893-94; Mr. Foley, 1894-95; Mr. Arthur Dumper, 1895-96.

Source: SDR's journals, FDRL.

The Loving Conspiracy 151

The smallest scratch on his finger u a bobo," his sympathetic mother
called it was enough to put off piano practice; he skipped church
often enough, pleading illness, that his father joked about his "Sunday
headaches" but let him stay home anyway.

In Paris, on their way home after Miss Buckingham returned to
England, the Roosevelts heard of another English governess with an
excellent reputation, a Miss Gerver, then living in Vienna. Mr. James
sent for her and she was hired. Within a day or two, however, Sara
wrote that she did not believe Miss Gerver "suitable"; in fact, "I do
not believe I can stand her."

"We always had people taking care of Franklin," she explained
years later, "who . . . gave him a great deal of time with us alone. It
was evident from the outset that this companion had no such inten
tions. We were never without her, but it seemed to bother Franklin
much less than it did me. On several occasions I asked him whether
he liked his governess, only to have him say, 'Oh, she's all right.' "

Sara continued to resent her, however, and when the time came to
decide whether she would return to Hyde Park with the family, she
pressed her son hard for his honest opinion: Did he really like her?

"I think she's perfectly awful," he said finally. "In fact, I have a
name for her. I call her the Iong4egged duckling."

Then why had he said she was all right?

"Because," he answered, "I thought after Father had gone to such
trouble and spent so much money to get her, it wouldn't be right for
me to complain."

Miss Gerver did not come to Springwood.

The governess who stayed with Franklin longest was Mademoi
selle Jeanne Sandoz, a French-speaking Swiss whom his parents hired
in 1891. She was just nineteen and barely five feet tall, but energetic
and experienced, having already cared for five Scottish children. She
was one of several applicants who filed through the Roosevelts' Lon
don hotel suite to be interviewed that fall, and Franklin himself had
helped choose her. "Mama, take that one," he had whispered loudly
enough so that she overheard him. "I like her. She smiles all the time."
She was in fact remarkably cheerful and enthusiastic; when things
were going especially well she liked to say all was "superfine, splendide
et pas chere."

Franklin may initially have thought her an easy mark; at nine, he
was nearly as tall as she. "Franklin works well enough," she told his
parents in her first report, "but his obedience outside of class leaves

152 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

much to be desired." She turned out to be a shrewd judge of the
dynamics of power at Springwood. To Franklin's mother, whom she
always thought "trts formidable, " she said she was sure he would
distinguish himself, and she seems to have known by instinct that the
best way to bring the boy into line was to appeal to his fear of letting
his parents down. 'Tour father is wasting his money," she told him
one day, u and I am wasting my time. I shall leave you." Thereafter,
the two became "fast friends," or so she recalled forty years later.

Franklin's exercise books show that he and Mademoiselle Sandoz
studied the Bible and catechism daily, along with arithmetic, science,
geography, poetry, music, history (ancient, European, and English,
but not American), as well as English and German. All but the last two
were taught in French, and when Franklin and his teacher dined
together that is all they allowed themselves to speak. He almost always
received a "tris bien" in history; his conduct was often "mal."

Later in her life, Mademoiselle Sandoz became interested in a num
ber of causes the Social Gospel, spiritualism, the League of Nations
and it has been suggested that she sought to inculcate an enhanced
sense of social conscience in her young charge. If she did, it does not
seem to have taken. In an essay on ancient history he could not contain
his amusement at her earnestness:

"The people of Egypt were divided into 3 classes: the Priests, the
Warriors and the work people. The land was divided between the
Warriors, the Priests and the Kings and each had a 3rd of it. The
working people had nothing. They lived in the porches of the temples
or in little straw huts. The kings made them work so hard and gave
them so little that by wingo! they nearly starved and by jinks! they had
hardly any clothes! So they died in quadrillions!" 6

6. The theory that Mademoiselle Sandoz somehow implanted in her young pupil, the seeds
of his social conscience is partly based upon an apparent misreading of a letter FDR wrote to
his old teacher from the White House in 1933. It reads in part: "I have often thought that it was
you, more than anyone else, who laid the foundation for my education." The very next sentence
suggests strongly, however, that all the President meant was that she had helped him master
French: "The lessons in French which I began at that time have stood me in good stead during
all these years, and here in Washington it is a great pleasure to be able to converse with the
members of the Diplomatic Corps in a common tongue." Two years later he wrote her again, '
enclosing a photograph of himself and paying the same cordial but limited tribute to the impact
of her teaching: "I think it will interest you to know that it has been the greatest possible help
to me to be able to speak French not only during the war days when I was in France and
Belgium, but also here in Washington where I meet so many foreigners and diplomats who
cannot speak English."

Whatever impact Mademoiselle Sandoz may or may not have had on Franklin, the fact that
she had been his teacher was important to her family long before he became President. One of
her nieces wrote to FDR in 1935 explaining that all through her childhood "I heard of the

The Loving Conspiracy 153

He was fond of Mademoiselle Sandoz and liked to try out jokes on
her: "What animals are always ready to travel? Answer: Elephants.
They always have their trunks with them." And she liked to recall the
Roosevelts' visit to West Superior, then still mostly mud, with pine
stakes marking out the projected streets. A new corridor rug had been
laid in the settlement's only hotel, and electric sparks crackled from it
with every footstep. "How Franklin ran up and down that corridor,"
she remembered, "making me run with him until I was breathless."

But he was not notably respectful. When the Roosevelts traveled
to Europe in 1892, he slept in the berth above hers and woke her each
morning by dangling a string down onto her face, and when she fell
from the family toboggan and bruised herself badly, even his mother
was momentarily displeased at his attitude: "Poor little Mile Sandoz.
. . . Franklin seems to think it a rather fine joke."

Her predecessor, a thin unsmiling German named Miss Reinsberg,
had fared worse. One afternoon while she was downstairs, Franklin
slipped into her bedroom and spooned a double dose of effervescent
powder into the chamber pot beneath her bed. When she used the pot
during the night and the powder began to bubble and hiss, she rushed
down the hall and awakened Mrs. Roosevelt to tell her of the alarming
symptom she had suddenly developed. His mother never figured out
what had happened or so FDR always maintained but Mr. James
did, and the boy was summoned to the smoking room for a solemn talk
with his father. Franklin confessed, and Mr. James, struggling to keep
from laughing, dismissed him, saying, "Consider yourself spanked."

Since Miss Reinsberg eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and
had to be hospitalized, and Mademoiselle Sandoz returned to Europe
to marry in 1893, FDR liked to say that he had driven one governess
to the madhouse and the other to matrimony.

Again, it was not his teachers but his parents who molded their
son's personality and character; his mother and his father who instilled
in him at least the rudiments of responsibility toward his community.
Both the Delanos and the Roosevelts took seriously the ancient notion

remarkable youth whom [Aunt Jeanne] had taught at Hyde Park, and for a long time there was
a photograph of him in my father's stamp album, a photo that was most delightful to our eyes,
for my brothers wore overalls and their feet were bare. But now and then Father would let us
see the boy with such fine clothes, and such neat hair. 'A fine young gentleman,' my Father would
remark. 'And don't forget that a Swiss woman was his teacher, and a Sandoz.' "

Sources: Constance Drexel, "Unpublished Letters of FDR to His French Governess," Par
ents' Magazine XXVI, September 1951, PPF 119, FDRL.

154 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

of "noblesse oblige." "One can be as democratic as one likes," Sara
once told her son, "but if we love our own, and if we love our neigh
bor, we owe a great example."

The Delanos of Algonac were once credited by a local newspaper
with being the wealthiest family in Newburgh, "or at least the most
liberal." Even the retiring Catherine Delano helped raise funds and
gather food for the needy, and her husband contributed to Booker T.
Washington's work for black education and uplift in the south. Sara
remembered seeing Washington at Algonac, welcomed onto the
piazza though not into the parlor. And when her sister Annie Hitch
came to live in the old house after her father's death, she became a
tireless force for good in her city. She presented Newburgh with a
park and served as president of the Associated Charities, for which she
coined the new and enlightened slogan: "Not alms, but a friend."
Old-fashioned charity was no longer enough, she argued; instead, "we
must furnish work to do away with pauperism." She was so much
admired that the local Elks made her a full-fledged member, the first
woman ever so designated.

After Mrs. Hitch died in 1926, an old friend recalled her work
among the city's least fortunate; "How often have I seen her step into
her automobile at the door while old Peter, her chauffeur, put in after
her half a dozen of the well-known Algonac baskets, filled with fruit
and flowers. No need to tell him where to go, as passing through the
city, he stopped at various humble dwellings. Here, notwithstanding
her lameness, he helped her up the steps carrying the baskets, and
voices of children could be heard, 'Here she comes. Here comes our
Mrs. Hitch.' "

Sara Roosevelt's own efforts were less strenuous. She dispatched
food, clothing, and cheering bouquets to the sick, paid faithful visits
to former servants and their families in time of need, and supervised
a sewing class at the Hyde Park School.

In a remarkable address delivered before the St. James Guild to
ward the end of his life, Mr. James offered his own earnest views of
a citizen's responsibilities toward himself, his family, and his commu
nity. The theme of his talk was "Work," and its first half was indistin
guishable from the complacent preachments of other wealthy men of
his day, a hymn to the virtues of toil, integrity, and thrift. Hard work
was the key to success: "There is not so much to luck as some people
profess to believe. Indeed, most people fail because they do not deserve
to succeed.

The Loving Conspiracy 155

"Extravagance," he continued, was "the pervading sin among all
classes of people, rich and poor alike; you see it everywhere, in your
public buildings, in your churches, in the streets, on the backs of your
wives and children, display in dress, in furniture, in equipage, in
entertainments, in marriage display in funerals . . . Go to your towns
and cities and see the velvets and silks sweeping the streets, the men
with their fast horses and extravagant habits, families in their brown
stone and marble fronts, all for show and fashion, how many do you
think can afford it?" (It is hard not to think that the show and fashion
of Rosy's life were on his father's mind when he wrote these words.)

He asked his listeners to think back to the days of their childhoods
when people lived sensibly within their means. "No man has any
business to live in a style which his income cannot support or to
mortgage his earnings of next week or of next year, in order to live
luxuriously today. The whole system of debt is wrong when we antici
pate or forestall the future." The thing to do was save. Ten cents a day
would do for a start. "Try it begin tomorrow. . . . The curtailment
of any selfish enjoyment will do it, a cigar, a paper of tobacco, a glass
of beer."

But Mr. James's travels had taught him that abstemiousness alone
could not solve the problems of the truly desperate. "In all countries
and all ages," he told the Guild, "there have been more workers than
work." He had himself seen what life was like in the squalid, crowded
tenements of New York, Paris, and London, "many of them contain
ing more people than this whole village." In Shepherd's Court in
London's East End, he had climbed tenement stairs to see a single
room that measured just three lengths of his cane one way and four
the other in which lived an entire family of ten. The floor was rotten
and full of holes; water ran down the walls and dripped from the
ceiling. The St. Giles district was still worse; here, the poor huddled
beneath the street in cellars, "dozens of them, you can see their open
mouths luridly lit by the fire and candle light below. These possess no
windows and the only way in which light and ventilation can be
conveyed to the inhabitants below is through a hole in the pavement."
He had clambered down a ladder, "several feet below the sewage and
gas pipes," and found there "half a dozen nearly nude and hideously
dirty children, a man toiling by the flame of a candle, a woman lying
ill abed, all in this pestiferous and dingy den."

Exhortation would not rescue these desperate people. "Help the
helpless!" Mr. James concluded. "Here is work for every man, woman,

156 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

and child in this audience tonight. The poorest man, the daily worker,
the obscurest individual, shares the gift and the blessings for doing
good. It is not necessary that men should be rich to be helpful to others.
Money may help, but money does not do all. It requires earnest pur
pose, honest self devotion and hard work. Help the poor, the widow,
the orphan; help the sick, the fallen man or woman, for the sake of our
common humanity. Help all who are suffering. Work then for your
daily support. Work for your wives and children. Work for fame and
honor. Work for humanity. Work for your Lord and Master.

"Man is dear to man; the poorest poor long for some moment in
a weary life when they can know and feel that they have been them
selves the fathers and dealers-out of some small blessings; have been
kind to such as needed kindness for that single cause that we have,
all of us, one human heart."

We do not know precisely when Mr. James exhorted his fellow
parishioners, and so cannot say whether Franklin was present at St.
James to hear him. But his father's views must have been as familiar
to the boy as was the setting in which they were delivered.

From his earliest days, St. James and the dignified, restrained Epi-
scopalianism it fostered embodied religious faith for Franklin Roose
velt. As a small boy, he only learned that there was "another church
in the village besides my own" when an elderly Methodist couple
invited him into their home for a slice of gingerbread. The wine-red
silk of the cushions on which he sat between his parents in the Roose
velt pew, the rhythm of the responses, the beauty of the language, the
singing of the choir (all his life he loved to sing hymns; "Art Thou
Weary, Art Thou Languid, Art Thou Sore Distressed" was his favor
ite), the genteel exhortations of the rector all provided him with
solace, comfort, continuity. So did the church itself. He had been
baptized in its chapel; his father and half brother were vestrymen and
senior wardens as he would be when the time came. 7 The walls and

7. FDR remained committed to his boyhood church to the day of his death, first as junior
vestryman and vestryman, then as senior warden. Vestry meetings were sometimes held at
Springwood after he was stricken with polio, usually on Saturday or Sunday afternoons. Even
during the worst days of World War II these often went on into the early hours of the morning.
"They never seemed to end," said Mary Newbold Morgan, FDR's childhood friend who re
mained his next-door neighbor after her marriage to Gerald Morgan, a former journalist, some
time businessman, and fellow member of the vestry. No detail of St. James's operation was too
small to hold the President's attention. He fretted over church investments, suggested the precise
wording of historical plaques, and sought to reduce the size and number of the family memorial
tablets that he felt cluttered the walls. In 1941, when the church treasurer resigned, FDR
nominated a candidate of his own. "What would you think of the young man who runs the drug
store [Raymond Hill]?" he wrote to Morgan. "He seems to be up and coming. He is a violent
Republican!" (footnote continued on next page}

The Loving Conspiracy 157

windows were covered with memorial plaques honoring old friends
from Hyde Park's most prominent families.

His faith always remained simple and unshakable. Much later in his
life, Eleanor Roosevelt asked him whether he and she shouldn't refrain
from trying to impose their own religious convictions on their chil
dren; wouldn't it be better to leave them free to make up their own
minds? FDR was astonished at the suggestion. His children would be
trained as he had been, as Episcopalians. "But are you sure that you
believe in everything you learned?" she asked. "I never really thought
about it," he said. "I think it is just as well not to think about things
like that too much." 8

Nor, so far as we know, did FDR ever seriously examine his
own apparently irresistible compulsion to collect things, a compul-

Sources: Interview with Gerald Morgan, Jr.; President's Secretary's File (PSF) 154, FDRL.

8. The sources of Roosevelt's apparently unquenchable optimism and self-assurance will
always remain to some extent mysterious. His sturdy religious faith must surely have been one
of them, however, and some biographers have placed especially heavy emphasis upon it. Rexford
Tugwell, for example, believed that his faith developed strongly during adolescence. "This belief
in and reliance upon a fatherly God to take the place of the earthly father who was retreating
into the shadows of age became so settled and fixed in his life as never again to be questioned
. . . ," he wrote. "The secret of his unassailable serenity and his easy gaiety lay in this sense of
oneness with ongoing processes of the universe and his feeling of being, as Emerson said, in tune
with the infinite." Always, Tugwell writes, when Roosevelt was about to undertake something
new, he would "ask all his colleagues in it to accompany him ... in asking for divine blessing
on what they were about to do. It must be remembered that one who asks and feels that he
receives support in this manner, and with sincerity, cannot, even in his own estimation go
disastrously wrong. If an error is made it is an understandable one and nearly always unavoidable
in the sense that no one could have done more."

Kenneth S. Davis goes still further. Roosevelt, he writes, "believing absolutely in God the
Father and Jesus Christ as the Son of God; believing that God, caring for each individual human
being, was infinitely kind and good as well as all-wise and -powerful; believing or feeling that
history was a working-out of divine purpose, that every truly fundamental historical force was a
manifestation of divine will believing all this, he must and did believe that history, though it had
at any given extended period of time a tidal ebb and flow, had in the long run a surging flow in one
direction. It was away from polar evil toward polar good. This was the essential progress, from
worse to better, a progress that was inevitable because it was God's will. As a chosen one, he himself
was an instrument of progress, a special agent on earth of divine beneficence. But only an
instrument. Only an agent ... By his religious faith and his self-conception in terms of it (his sense

assigned, imposed from on High. It remained God's. And the ultimate responsibility for his use of
it was therefore also God's. This conviction enabled him to act, often, as if he were possessed of
what Spengler called a 'dreamlike certainty' of decision."

Surely religious certitude helped FDR make hard decisions and to sleep soundly once they
were made. But the basic question remains unanswered. How did he first become persuaded that
he was what Davis calls "a chosen one"? Who chose him? Religion helped confirm his sense of
himself, but the real answer to that hardest of biographical questions, I believe, lies not at St. James
but down the Albany Road, within the walls of Springwood.

Sources: Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt, pages 31-32; Davis, "FDR as a Biographer's
Problem," The American Scholar, Winter, 1983/84.

158 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

sion first felt during his boyhood but from which he was never
free.

In 1938 he announced plans to have built at Hyde Park a library
to house his personal and presidential papers and his various collec
tions. The repository was to be constructed with private money
some 28,000 people eventually contributed to the building fund.

But the land on which it stood just outside his mother's
rose garden, at the western edge of his father's hayfield would be
deeded to the nation. Eventually, most of Springwood would be given
to the federal government "to be maintained for the benefit of the
public."

It was an unprecedented notion; Roosevelt's thirty predecessors
had been content to scatter their papers among libraries and descend
ants all over the country, and his enemies inevitably saw in it evidence
of megalomania. The journalist John T. Flynn compared FDR to "an
Egyptian Pharaoh" who wished to transform his estate into a "Yankee
Pyramid." But Roosevelt faced an unprecedented problem. His ability
to communicate directly with the millions of ordinary citizens he
called "my friends" had loosed a torrent of mail on the White House.
Four thousand letters addressed to him arrived daily in 1940, for exam
ple, more than ten times the number that had come to Herbert Hoover.
And the vast expansion of federal responsibility and power over which
he so cheerfully presided yielded an equally vast growth of federal
paperwork. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library would one day contain
forty-five tons of documents.

But just as important was Roosevelt's own inability to throw any
thing away. He was a self-confessed pack rat. "I have destroyed prac
tically nothing," he admitted, and the result, even he knew, was "a
mine for which future historians will curse ... as well as praise me."
This was in part an inheritance from the Delanos, who seem to have
believed that nothing they wrote or received or simply owned was
unimportant, precisely because it had passed through their hands.
His mother helped inculcate that attitude, reverently saving his child
ish drawings and letters, his books and best-loved toys. But in Frank
lin Roosevelt it became almost obsessive. At one time or another he
seems to have collected everything. The thousands of physical ob
jects he left to the library are in some ways more revealing than his
voluminous but circumspect papers; they constitute "a very con
glomerate, hit-or-miss, all-over-the-place collection," he once said,
"on every man, animal, subject or material."

The Loving Conspiracy 159

His stamps were his best-known collection, well over a million of
them in 150 matching albums. His physician, Admiral Ross T. Mcln-
tire, who saw him nearly every day in the White House, estimated that
FDR spent at least 2,140 hours poring over these bright bits of paper
during his dozen busy years in the White House. But stamps were only
part of Roosevelt's variegated hoard. There were also some 15,000
books 2,500 volumes on the American Navy alone, hundreds more
on the history of Dutchess County, but also children's books, chil
dren's books in French, miniature books, first editions, books with
lavish illustrations. His collection of naval paintings and prints alone
included some 1,200 items, plus thirty-seven leather-bound albums
filled with photographs of naval vessels, each carefully captioned in his
own bold, slanting hand. There were groups of English political car
toons, drawings by George Cruikshank, and some 200 fully rigged
ship models, so many that the White House staff despaired of ever
keeping them all dusted. Even Roosevelt's presidential desk was
thickly forested with scores of miniature donkeys and elephants and
Scotties.

This headlong enthusiasm for hobbies and collecting seems to have
begun very early but to have intensified after 1890, when, with his
father forbidden to overexert himself and increasingly distracted by
concern for his own failing health, Franklin found himself with still
more time to spend on his own.

The first letter he ever wrote at age five and inevitably addressed
to his mother had included two surprisingly detailed drawings of
sailboats. He came by his lifelong love of ships and the sea naturally.
His father and half brother were enthusiastic yachtsmen, but his
mother attributed her son's enthusiasm directly to "my own love of
ships and distant horizons. . . . The Delanos have always been
associated with the sea," she explained, and "I have always been a great
believer in heredity."

She and her father took turns telling Franklin stories of seafaring;
so did his nurse Mamie, tales so exciting that he wasn't entirely sure
he believed them, but always asked for more, His frequent visits to the
Delano homestead at Fairhaven were voyages into maritime history.
From the old stone wharf built by his great-grandfather he could gaze
out at the masts of a score or so of old whalers still at anchor in New
Bedford harbor. His grandfather gave him a battered sea chest in which
the boy carefully kept a collection of family relics: a button from a
naval officer's coat, said to have been shot off in combat; a miniature

160 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

brass cannon; his great-uncle's sailor hat worn in the War of 18 12. And
on his own in the cluttered attic he uncovered a set of whalers' logs.
They were bound in canvas, "with stenciled whales in the margins,"
Roosevelt remembered, "the speaking of other ships, the total of the
catch, the visits to Fayal, to the Falklands, to Unalaska . . . Here was
a tale."

He sailed toy boats, carved and collected miniature ships, read
naval history with special attention to the works of Admiral Alfred
Thayer Mahan, and rejoiced when in 1891 Mr. James took delivery of
the Half Moon, a fifty-one-foot sailing yacht with an auxiliary naphtha
motor. She had her own uniformed captain and three-man crew, of
course, but Franklin often took the wheel. He was still more pleased
at sixteen when his father presented him with his own twenty-one-foot
knockabout; he named her the New Moon and sailed her almost daily
every summer at Campobello, learning to navigate the rocks and tides
and treacherous currents of the Bay of Fundy.

His mother was largely responsible for introducing him to stamp
collecting, too. Her own collection, begun when she was five and pin
ing for her distant father, had long since been passed on to her brother
Fred. He, in turn, had greatly enlarged it before losing interest; and
when he presented it to his ten-year-old nephew in 1 892, it was already
comprehensive enough to make most adult collectors envious. Franklin
spent evening after evening adding to it, pasting new stamps into al
bums and making careful notes on the pages, studying their designs,
wondering about the countries from which they came. Not even his
mother's nightly reading aloud could interrupt him. Once, annoyed at
his apparent inattention, she demanded that he tell her what she had just
read. He repeated it back almost verbatim, explaining that he would be
ashamed of himself if he couldn't do two things at once.

Birds interested him almost as much. He had collected eggs and
nests as a small boy; one little girl, invited to Springwood for an Easter
egg hunt, recalled that Franklin had arrived late, emerging slowly from
the woods and inching his way across the lawn, a brilliant blue robin's
egg cupped in his small hands. Soon eggs and nests no longer satisfied;
he wanted to collect the birds themselves, and at ten he began asking
for a shotgun. His mother thought this a dreadful idea the boy was
much too young but his father agreed, presenting him with a gun on
his eleventh birthday. With it came a set of rules: There was to be no
shooting during the mating season; nesting birds were off-limits; only
one member of each species was to be collected.

The Loving Conspiracy 161

That shiny new gun meant many things to Franklin. It helped
him create a collection of stuffed birds, first of all. But ornithology,
in turn, licensed him to kill, to affect things directly on his own and
out from under his mother's anxious love. He became an "insatiable"
hunter, she wrote, and something of his passion survives in a compo
sition he dashed off for Mademoiselle Sandoz in 1893. The subject
was "Guns and Squirrels." "Many Mamas," it read in part, "think
guns are very dangerous things & think they will go off without
cartridges or without being cocked, but if properly handled they are
not dangerous. Some boys if they saw a solitary squirrel would cock
both barrels & on killing him with the first, would probably forget
that the other barrel was cocked & should he touch the trigger it
would go, bang! . . . 9 It is great fun shooting [squirrels] and it is not
very easy to get a shot at them while sitting still; when they fall they
bump their heads on the ground three times before they die. The old
ones hold on to the branches & try to hide when wounded. I have
fired at a squirrel 5 times & when he fell counted 31 shots in his
body!"

He kept a day-by-day tally of his kills: "Shot a Pine Finch. The
bird was alone in a small pine tree, and he appeared very shy. Had
great difficulty in shooting him. . . . Shot a Barred Owl at 5 PM in
Newbold's Gully." He skinned his own birds and did his best to
mount the first few, though his mother said the effort made him turn
"quite green." But when it was clear that he would never warm to
this redolent hobby he was allowed to send his trophies off to profes
sional taxidermists in New York and Poughkeepsie. By the age of
fourteen he had shot and identified more than 300 different species
native to Dutchess County.

His mother was proud of his skill and industry. She lined book
shelves and mantelpieces with his mounted specimens and eventually
had a glass-fronted case built for them in the entrance hall; a big dusty
harrier hawk hung from a wire in front of it. The birds greeted guests
right through the presidential years, the labels beneath their claws
written out in FDR's boyish hand.

9. His own mama evidently feared this with good reason. On April 14 of the following
year, while Franklin was walking with her and his current governess, Miss Clay, his gun did
go off accidentally. The pellets buried themselves harmlessly in the ground. And at some point
later in his hunting career, Mr. James took his gun away from him for a time because the boy
had carelessly fired it in the general direction of some people walking along the Albany
Road.

Source: SDR diary, FDRL.

162 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Ornithology won him the admiration of other adults as well. His
grandfather Delano made him a life member of the New York Museum
of Natural History, and when he was fifteen its bird department grate
fully acknowledged his gift of ten carefully prepared pine grosbeak
skins. And it helped him overcome his early shyness. Traveling in
England with his parents, he was desolated when a business appoint
ment in London forced them to cancel a planned visit to Osberton-in-
Worksop, the Nottinghamshire seat of Cecil Foljambe, the Baron
Hawkesbury, one of England's most knowledgeable bird fanciers,
whose collection of mounted birds was unmatched outside of mu
seums.

u Mummie, can't I go without you?" Franklin begged.

u You mean you'd visit people you had never met?" she answered,
genuinely surprised.

"I'd go anywhere to see those birds," he answered. His parents
allowed him to take the train alone, and the elderly baron and the
eleven-year-old American ornithologist spent the afternoon together
talking about birds and gravely examining the glass cases. At day's end,
the baron insisted on sending his housekeeper to escort Franklin back
to London on the train. "This must have been a great blow to his
pride," his mother wrote, "for he considered himself quite grown up
and self-reliant." But of course he did not show it.

In hunting, as in everything else, his assumption was always that
things would work out well for him. One day he strolled into the house
from the river side and asked for his gun. His mother asked why he
wanted it.

"There's a winter wren up in one of those big trees down there,"
he said. "I want to get him."

His mother unlocked the cabinet in which the gun was kept. "Why
do you think the wren is going to oblige you by staying there while
you come in and get your gun?"

"Oh," said Franklin, shouldering his shotgun. "He'll wait."

He returned a few minutes later, his weapon in one hand, the warm
dead bird in the other.

Even Franklin's genuine ornithological accomplishments were evi
dently not enough for him. Perhaps too much emphasis on the impor
tance of being grown up beyond his years had made him dissatisfied
on some level with what he could do on his own; he must have known
within himself that whatever his admiring parents and grandparents
might say, his work could not really compare favorably with that of

The Loving Conspiracy 163

adults. In any case, in the spring of 1896, when he was fourteen, he
contributed a short article on birds to the third issue of The Foursome,
a homemade children's magazine compiled at Tuxedo Park for the
family by his cousins Warren and Muriel Robbins. The essay is called
"Spring Song," and while its source is unknown, much of it appears
to be plagiarized. The ornate yet chatty style gives it away; it is written
in the voice of a weary adult hack, not an adolescent: "Listen, the
bugler has come!" it begins. "A few shrill notes and a trill, and we see
our friend the Song Sparrow. In quick succession the Robins and the
Bluebirds arrive. This is the advance guard. A few days more and Black
Birds appear. Hear their juicy note, which reminds you of strawberries
and cream, but venture too close and they will be off with a cheery
'Can't catch me.' " The ending is even more elaborate: "The Peabody
Bird 10 or White Throated Sparrow comes at this time, and he will stay
with us until driven southward by the cold, when, sitting on a fence
rail, he bids us 'Farewell.' "

No one seems ever to have found him out, and his mother proudly
kept this effort alongside his far clumsier authentic boyhood writings.
Perhaps appropriating the words of others did not present a problem
for his conscience; like tutors and toys, they were at hand for his use. 11

The hobbies that consumed Franklin Roosevelt as a boy seem at
first to have been remarkably diverse sailing and the sea, collecting
stamps, the shooting and classification of birds. Yet they may all also
be seen as reactions to his mother's fond but unyielding efforts to
control him. Squinting down the barrel of his shotgun or gripping the
New Moon 's wheel, he was in charge. His decisions made things hap
pen, his alone, and not his mother's. Collecting and classifying, too,
fostered independence, a quieter kind perhaps, but just as determinedly
defended; in arranging his birds or stamps he was able to order a world
of his own, one in which his mother was only an interloper.

In all of these activities, Franklin pleased himself while pleasing
adults. Other children did not matter much, and we know little of how
he conducted himself when thrown together with them. He knew few
other children, and only a tiny handful of those he did know left even
brief memoirs of their time together. But one early friend's detailed

10. This interpolation was probably an inside joke, a reference to the Reverend Endicott
Peabody, founder and headmaster of Groton School, to which both Franklin and Warren
Robbins would go,

1 1 . At the risk of pushing the evidence too hard, it may not be accidental that FDR became
the first President consistently to call upon ghostwriters to help him express himself.

164 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

account of her first encounter with him reveals in miniature how he
would always confront the world.

One winter morning in 1892, Miss Huybertie Pruyn of Albany was
told she would have a visitor. Her mother said that a Mr. and Mrs,
Roosevelt of New York were coming for the night and were bringing
with them their ten-year-old son, Franklin. Bertie was fourteen and
not enthusiastic. She was to be nice to the boy, "polite and helpful,"
even though he was much younger than she, her mother added, for u he
is bound to have good manners." Bertie was unmoved, and when she
spotted her young friend Erastus Corning III, known as "Ratty"
across the street, she told him about the priggish little stranger who was
on his way. Ratty sympathized. "I can settle him for you," he said,
packing a snowball with his gloved hands. "I can trip him up so he
won't know what happened and then wash his face. He's probably a
New York sissy."

The Pruyn family sleigh jingled around the corner. Mr. James and
Sara sat in front, wrapped in bear rugs against the cold. Franklin,
slender and small, sat in the back. "Ratty and I stood there with our
sleds," Bertie recalled. "I am sure we did not look any too cordial."
Then, "almost before Owen the footman could jump off the box to
open the sleigh door," Franklin leaped down, held out his hand, and
asked, " 'May I go coasting with you?' He took us completely by
surprise," Bertie remembered. "We forgot our inhospitable plans and
. . . ran for the toboggan slide. Our guest was no sissy. He soon showed
us he knew more about all kinds of coasting than we did, and he turned
hand-springs down the slide."

Franklin Roosevelt already knew at ten the power of his charm to
disarm, that the best way for him to overcome his own insecurity was
to act always as if it did not exist.

Later, Bertie and Franklin had supper together in the pantry; their
parents were to dine at eight. "We were good friends by this time in
spite of the difference in ages he was old for his age and I was young
for mine," she wrote. "I suggested we hurry up and get out by the
play-room door to the garden before I was caught to do my lessons.
It was a lovely evening and the slide in fine condition. After we had
coasted awhile, our old laundress Mary O'Mara stopped ... on her way
to her room over the laundry [and] said 'Sure, 'tis too bad for ye to be
leading that little boy in the paths of sin keeping him out of bed this
time of night, poor lad.' "

The Loving Conspiracy 165

The City Hall bell tolled nine o'clock. Franklin said he was sup
posed to be in bed that his mother would be sure to go upstairs after
dinner and find he was not there. "I said I, too, was supposed to be
in bed," Bertie remembered. "I got 50 cents a week if I was prompt
but we cannot go in now. The dinner party is over. They are going
into the Conservatory. We must get the ice cream. We went down the
outside cellar stairs and through the blackness of the cellar with only
the glow from the furnaces to give a faint light and make the shadows
look blacker. I did not think [Franklin] was frightened when I told him
to wait by the inside stairs while I went to loot the ice cream. In my

moccasins no one could hear me, and luck was with me The silver

platter of ice cream was on the dumb waiter which had been sent down
from the pantry and, more luck, there was also a platter of cakes. I
rushed back with them, almost falling downstairs in my . . . hurry. We
carried our loot into the garden."

The tall girl and her new friend sat on their slides taking turns
eating, the lamplight from the conservatory windows glittering on the
snow, their delight doubled because they could look inside while they
spooned in the stolen dessert and watch their unsuspecting parents
sipping madeira. When they had eaten all they could, they left the
platter on a sled for the family dog to lick and crouched down by the
garden gate to hurl snowballs at the ankles of churchgoers tramping
home from evening services.

After a time they heard Bridget the cook shouting, "What has she
done with the platter? Is it coasting on it, they are? Sure, the poor little
boy will be sick with the goings-on. And the dog is eating off the
silver," Then Mr. James began calling for Franklin from the dining-
room piazza. "There was nothing we could do," Bertie remembered,
"but to go in and receive . . . mild scoldings as to the lateness of the
hour."

Later, when his mother came upstairs to see if he was well tucked
into bed, she said she hoped he'd had a good time. He had, he told her,
but the maid had said he had been "lured into the paths of sin" and
he wanted to know what that meant. Answering his question might
have proved embarrassing, and so his mother pretended not to hear
him and said good night.

Bertie would much later marry Charles Hamlin, a member of the
Federal Reserve Board, and she often saw FDR, in Washington and
elsewhere. Once, riding with her in a White House elevator, he re-

166 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

called that snowy evening in Albany. He had never been so frightened
in his life, he confessed, as he had been while waiting alone in that
cellar for her to steal the ice cream.

On a cold November evening in 1892, ten-year-old Franklin was
asleep in his brass bed in his big room at the top of the Springwood
stairs when he heard strange music "Yankee Doodle/' rattled and
shrilled on a snare drum and piccolo. He ran to the window to see a
parade of farm wagons turning into the long driveway, accompanied
by men carrying torches. Hurrying downstairs in his nightshirt, he
joined his father and mother on the porch. It was election night, and
Grover Cleveland had been returned to the White House. Friends of
Mr. James had gone to Poughkeepsie for the returns, then raced back
to bring the glorious news. "Yankee Doodle" had been the agreed-
upon signal that the Democrats were back in power "the sweetest
music I ever heard," Mr. James said and all the Democrats in town
had turned out to celebrate. One farmer, seeing Franklin shiver from
cold and excitement, leaned out from his wagon to hand him a buffalo
robe. The boy wrapped himself in it, he remembered at another
Springwood victory celebration many years later, "and had a perfectly
grand evening."

A Democratic triumph was almost always good news to the Roose-
velts, but this one meant more than usual. Mr. James expected that it
would greatly improve the prospects of his latest scheme to make
himself a still richer man. He had helped form the Maritime Canal
Company of Nicaragua during the 1880s. Its aim was to link the
Atlantic and Pacific by scooping out a navigable canal that would run
through Lake Nicaragua in direct competition with a French effort
directed by the builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Mr.
James had helped lobby Congress for its incorporation during the
winter the Roosevelts spent in Washington in 1887, and had looked
on as his friend President Cleveland signed it into law. The French
project had conveniently failed since, and preliminary construction on
the American canal had begun in 1890, but millions of additional
dollars would be needed. It was Mr. James's fond expectation that
Cleveland could be counted upon to help obtain them.

Then there was the matter of Rosy's stalled diplomatic career. The
Republican victory four years earlier had forced him to leave his post
in Vienna, and he had been drifting amiably ever since. Cleveland's
election prodded him to action. He had contributed $10,000 to the

The Loving Conspiracy 167

Democratic campaign. Now he wished to be made American ambassa
dor to Belgium. His old chief at Vienna, General Alexander Lawton,
wrote a dutiful recommendation to the President on his behalf. Under
standably, it placed heavier emphasis on Rosy's geniality and good
manners than his skills. The ambassadorship went to someone else, but
the following autumn Rosy was offered the post of first secretary of
the London embassy.

He was in many ways a natural choice. He already lived much of
the time in England; many of his closest friends were Britons; and with
his increasing corpulence, his waxed mustache, and graying well-
barbered beard, he even bore a remarkable resemblance to the leader
of the fashionable sporting set in which he already played a prominent
role Edward, Prince of Wales, himself. Nor would the first secre
tary's duties unduly interrupt his pleasures. There was a rush of work
each spring when flocks of ambitious young American women and
their mothers arrived in London determined to attend the Queen's
Drawing Room, and it was the first secretary's delicate task to pick and
choose among them. But otherwise there would be plenty of opportu
nity for him to drive and shoot and follow the races at Epsom, Ascot,
and Newmarket Heath.

Mr. James, Sara, and Franklin visited Rosy and his family at their
country seat near Ascot on their way home from Bad Nauheim that
October. Sara noticed that Helen Astor Roosevelt, Rosy's wife, seemed
ill and "thin." She spoke personally with the family physician, who
said Helen's liver was at fault; it was sluggish and only a regimen of
determined horseback riding could jar it into working properly again.

Shortly after they had returned to Hyde Park a cable came from
Rosy saying that Helen had fallen "seriously ill" James and Sara
offered to return at once to England, but Rosy wired back that the
doctor had grown more optimistic: "Do not come."

Mr. James was deeply wounded by this, and when on November
12 another cable arrived saying that Helen had died, he refused to
consider sailing for England. "James is unwilling to offer to go again,"
Sara noted in her journal, "as he thinks Rosy does not want us."

Rosy was in "an agony of grief," he said, but there were practical
matters to be dealt with. He had his wife interred in the Episcopal
cemetery at Ascot, and was later infuriated to receive a bill for fourteen
pounds for a temporary grave marker, double the usual amount "on
the grounds of being a non-parishioner." He would bring her remains
home to Hyde Park for burial behind St. James the following June.

168 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Meanwhile, who would help care for his motherless children? Who
would act as his hostess at the formal dinners his new position would
inevitably require him to give? Who would now intercede for him
with the big quarrelsome Astor clan?

His answer was the same one that other troubled Roosevelts of his
generation fell back on: Bamie. Anna Roosevelt was still unmarried in
1893 and physically handicapped, but rocklike in times of crisis. As
soon as word came of Helen's death, she offered to come to London
and help out. Rosy gratefully accepted. It was an extraordinarily gen
erous offer. "You are an angel, as usual," wrote her friend Mrs. Henry
Cabot Lodge, "to go & take care of all the poor forlorn things of the
world." And even Bamie, with all her energy and eagerness to aid the
members of the family, might not have made it had she not had a secret
objective of her own.

Mr. James, nearly twice her age, had once been in love with Bamie
before he met Sara Delano. Now Bamie, in turn, had become inter
ested in his eldest son. Neither she nor Rosy was young anymore
both were thirty-eight and each was in need of companionship.
Bamie knew she was not beautiful, but perhaps the time had come
when Rosy might be encouraged to overlook those shortcomings in
favor of her warmth, intelligence, and spirit. She would go to London,
become Rosy's hostess, and hope to become his wife. 12 Sara and Mr.
James visited her in New York as soon as they heard of her plans and
were puzzled by her determination. "She seems to want to go," Sara
wrote in her diary.

She went, and within a few days of her arrival had dismissed the
beautiful young French governess Rosy had just hired for his daughter,
explaining that she was "unsuitable" for the household of a widower,
and replacing her with a British nanny with reassuringly white hair.
Bamie was an immediate social triumph, so gracious, adept, and charm
ing that the ambassador himself, former Secretary of State Thomas F.
Bayard, made her the unofficial hostess for the entire embassy. Nor did
she ignore Rosy's special problems. She stood by him when he went
to court, seeking to force the Astor trust to raise his children's annual
allowance of $30,000 from their mother's estate of $1.5 million. The
suit backfired, to Rosy's intense embarrassment; instead of raising the
allowance, the New York Supreme Court judge cut it in half, declaring

12. In this she evidently had the backing of her brother Theodore. Rosy was "a dear good
fellow," he told her when Rosy visited him briefly in Washington in 1894. "It was a real pleasure
to see him and have a long talk about you, and his own affairs and everything. I like him so much."

Source: Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Harvard University.

The Loving Conspiracy 169

that children "should be brought up to prudence and moderation
rather than to extravagance and the gratification of every luxurious
desire." And when a venerable employee of the Astors died and Mrs.
Astor and her son Jack demanded that Rosy resign his post and hurry
home to New York to take his place, he refused, then put Bamie u in
charge of the negotiations" with the Astors. She proved so steely a
negotiator that Mrs. Astor angrily accused her of being "biased," inter
ested in keeping Rosy abroad only for "her own benefit." Rosy indig
nantly denied the charge in a letter to his mother-in-law; it was "quite
unjustifiable, as you must know."

But it was not entirely unjustifiable. Bamie did hope to hold him
in London for her own purposes. What she did not know was that
Rosy's future as a diplomat was not all that kept him there. Sometime
during his London years he had secretly acquired a mistress, a lovely
soft-spoken woman named Elizabeth Riley, and called "Betty." She
was the daughter of a rural clergyman and was a clerk at Harrods
department store when he met her. At some point in early 1895, Bamie
evidently found out about her existence and learned that Rosy was
genuinely devoted to her though marriage then seemed out of the
question.

All this she evidently kept to herself, and shortly thereafter, to the
astonishment of her entire family, she announced her engagement
instead to Navy Commander William Sheffield Cowles, ten years her
senior, a portly, placid man from Connecticut, with a gray walrus
mustache. She would come to call him "Mr. Bearo." They were mar
ried in London; Rosy gave the bride away. Despite everything, he and
Bamie remained friends all their lives.

Meanwhile, the children needed attending to. Helen was just
twelve when her mother died, but now doing well under the care of
Bamie and her new English governess. Taddy, at fourteen, was more
problematical. If he was to attend college as his father hoped, he needed
preparatory training, but Rosy thought him too delicate for any of the
English public schools to which the sons of his British friends went;
he was too far behind in his studies and had too little "self-reliance."
What the boy needed, Rosy said, was to go to a school in his own
country where he could learn among the right sort of "personal influ
ences to strengthen his character."

Those influences, that character-building, were the stock in trade
of the Reverend Endicott Peabody , founder and headmaster of Groton
School at Groton, Massachusetts. He was a man of immense personal

170 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

magnetism tall, sandy-haired, athletic, with a steady blue gaze and a
deep voice of astonishing resonance, and he came from a sturdy, well-
connected old Salem family. His father was a partner in the American-
owned London banking firm of J & S Morgan & Co., and young
Endicott "Cotty" to friends and family, though never to his boys
had been educated in England, first at Cheltenham College, then at
Cambridge. While in England he had been so moved by the majesty
and ritual of the Church of England that he had abandoned the chaste
Unitarianism of his fathers and began to dream of becoming an Angli
can clergyman. He tried to make a go of banking when he got back
to the States but found it unsatisfying, and finally entered the Episco
pal Theological Seminary at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His first church had been at Tombstone, in Arizona Territory. He
had arrived there, in fact, windburned and covered with dust from a
six-hour ride on top of a swaying stagecoach on January 29, 1882, at
about the time Sara Delano Roosevelt was going into labor at Hyde
Park. Tombstone was then a wide-open mining camp what little law
there was grew from the pistols of the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan,
and Virgil but Peabody managed to thrive there, holding services
every Sunday in the courthouse while persuading the townspeople
first to pay for and then to build a permanent church, the very first
Episcopal church in the territory. Peabody liked the town, and it liked
him. The Tombstone Epitaph noted with pleasure that in him they had
"a parson who doesn't flirt with the girls, who doesn't drink beer
behind the door, and when it comes to baseball, he's a daisy."

But he had larger plans. He wanted to marry his lovely first cousin,
Fanny Peabody, back in Massachusetts, and then with her at his side
to create a church boarding school for upper-class boys. Once Pea-
body's mind fixed on an objective, few could resist him. He returned
to New England and laid energetic siege to his father's wealthy
friends, J. P. Morgan among them, and in early 1883 was rewarded
with a gift of ninety acres of farmland near the tiny Massachusetts
town of Groton, thirty-five miles north of Boston, along with enough
money to begin to build. (Fanny Peabody held out a little longer; she
and the rector were married in the summer of 1885, just after Groton's
first academic year had ended.)

Franklin Roosevelt had been enrolled for Groton before its founda
tion had been dug. Although there was already a direct family link
Theodore Roosevelt was married to Peabody's cousin Alice Lee Mr.
James and Sara apparently first learned of the young rector and his

The Loving Conspiracy 171

school during their initial visit to Campobello in the summer of 1883.
Their friend James Lawrence was an especially enthusiastic trustee
it was he who had deeded land for the school; he and his wife lived
just down the road and one evening after dinner, seated before a
roaring fire in the inn where both couples were staying, he conveyed
his enthusiasm to the Roosevelts. Groton was to be unique among
American private schools, he said, headed by an Episcopal clergyman
and run along the enlightened lines laid down by the great British
headmaster Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, where Mr. James had once
considered sending Rosy. The worst abuses of other English schools
fagging, flogging, snobbery would be outlawed. Instead, as Pea-
body's prospectus explained, "every endeavor [would] be made to
cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physi
cal as well as intellectual development." The student body was to be
small there would be just twenty-seven boys in the first entering class
so as to retain what Peabody called u the family aspect," and they
were all expected to attend the school for six straight years, beginning
at the age of twelve.

Even though opening day was more than a year off, Lawrence said,
prominent men were already signing up their sons so swiftly that there
might soon not be room for more. Peabody's personality had won
them over; that plus the importance of the school's trustees and the
fact, as Peabody's friend Frank D. Ashburn wrote, that many wealthy
fathers were then "privately disgusted with the bringing up of well-to-
do boys of that period. They thought them spoiled ladies' men tied to
women's apron strings, and heartily welcomed the chance to send their
sons to a place where the boys had to stand on their own feet and play
rough-and-tumble games."

The Roosevelts were at first a little amused at their friend's unex
pected zeal, Sara remembered many years later, but they heeded his
warning and placed Franklin's name on the waiting list right away.

Now, ten years later, Rosy wrote to Peabody from London, asking
that Taddy be admitted, too. It would be hard for him to part with the
boy, he said, but it had been his late wife's "strong wish and desire"
that Taddy be sent to Groton to learn "application, self-confidence and
thoroughness."

The rector somehow found room for Taddy, linked as he was to
both the Roosevelts and the Astors, even though it meant that the boy
would begin his studies toward the end of the second form rather than
at the beginning of the first.

172 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

That decision would have an unforeseeable but important impact
on Franklin's future.

Mr. James met the pale, forlorn fourteen-year-old at the dock on
March 31, 1894 August Belmont, Jr., the sportsman son of the
Roosevelts' old friend, had brought the boy home from England and
Sara saw to it that he went to the dentist and helped him pack his
belongings. Both elder Roosevelts escorted him to Groton and left him
there, weeping and lonely, to try his best to catch up with his new
classmates before vacation began. Rosy returned briefly to Hyde Park
in June with his wife's remains, and after the burial behind St. James
and a short consultation with his superiors in Washington, he sailed
back to England with Taddy for the summer.

When Taddy returned to Groton the following September, still
"looking very badly," according to Sara, and bitterly homesick for his
distant father from whom he rarely heard, Franklin should have gone
with him. He was twelve that fall, the customary age at which boys
entered Peabody's care; in fact, in later years, the headmaster proved
reluctant to take any boy who could not begin his studies in the first
form.

But at some point between the day Franklin's parents placed his
name on the Groton rolls and the autumn of his twelfth year, they had
decided to forestall his leaving home for two more years. He would
enter Groton in 1896 at fourteen, not twelve; in the third form, not
the first.

Precisely why, no one now can say. Tradition holds that it was his
mother who could not bear to part with him so soon. But it seems
likely that Mr. James, too, wished to hold on to him as long as he could.
They were equally devoted to the boy Sara once called "our especial
treasure." And just as her fondest wish for her son was always that "he
grow to be like his father," his father continued to consider the manner
in which he himself had been raised the proper pattern for bringing
up Franklin. Mr. James himself had been nearly fourteen when he had
left home for the Hyde School at Lee, Massachusetts, after all, and like
his old schoolmaster, the Reverend Alexander Hyde, Endicott Pea-
body was a New England clergyman; like him, too, he offered his
pupils a church-oriented education in a homelike atmosphere. Each
evening both the rector and Mrs. Peabody said good night to every
individual boy. After Groton, Franklin would continue on to college
and then to law school, just as Mr. James and Rosy had.

The Loving Conspiracy 173

Evidence that this was how Mr. James reasoned came the following
year, when Franklin expressed a tentative wish to attend Annapolis
and then to become an officer in the Navy. It is almost the only known
instance in which he risked a direct confrontation with his father. Mr.
James took him aside and spoke to him "man to man," FDR recalled.
It would simply be too cruel for an only son to be away from his
parents as much as a naval career would require, his father explained;
instead, college and the law would provide him with the right sort of
preparation for any kind of work a gentleman might be called upon
to perform.

Franklin may have been deeply disappointed he would never get
over his love for the sea or his romantic feeling for the Navy but he
backed down fast. He knew he must not irritate his ailing father with
further argument, must seem always to surrender cheerfully.

At about the same time that Rosy first wrote to Peabody seeking
a place for his son, Mr. James was writing to him about Franklin. His
latest governess, Miss Alice Clay, was not working out. She had come
to Hyde Park from London in the autumn of 1893 when Franklin was
eleven, and, while "a perfect lady," she was simply not up to the job
of thoroughly preparing "a bright boy" for Groton. Besides, though
Mr. James did not say so explicitly, he seems to have felt it was time
for the boy to experience more steady male companionship. With
himself no longer able to accompany Franklin in the more rugged
forms of play, the boy was on his own more than his father liked. John
Griner, one of the Springwood workmen, had taught him simple
carpentry, which he seemed to enjoy, and there were always pets to
care for and play with. Franklin would later recall lazy afternoons
spent lying on his stomach in the grass, eating wild strawberries or,
with his dogs, futilely stalking the woodchucks whose warrens pocked
the big hayfield in front of the house. 13 But time was passing, and Mr.
James wondered whether the rector could recommend someone: "a
New England man," if possible, "a gentleman . . . one who could
inspire respect and ... be my boy's companion." "Have we in this
country," he asked, "any men with the culture and training of English
men, combined with the standard character of the American gentle
man?"

13. FDR remembered the Springwood woodchucks fondly during the dedication of his
library in 1941, asking that their descendants be permitted to occupy the estate in perpetuity.
And so, in the spring and summer and early autumn they may still be seen almost everywhere
on the old estate, poised at the entrances to their burrows, then plunging underground in fat
anxious flurries if you draw too close.

174 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Peabody's reply is lost, but not long thereafter the Roosevelts did
hire a tutor, a young man named Foley who did not work out either.
Mr. James angrily dismissed him within a few months when he failed
to return on time from a holiday.

The man who finally filled the Roosevelts' demanding bill was Mr.
Arthur Dumper, who arrived at Springwood in September of 1895.
He was a handsome, vigorous young master of Latin and mathematics
at St. Paul's School Mr. James had learned of him from Henry A.
Coit, the headmaster of St. Paul's, whom the Roosevelts had met on
shipboard coming home from Europe that summer with a Phi Beta
Kappa from Kenyon and plans to become an Episcopal clergyman.
Dumper stayed with Franklin until he entered Groton the following
autumn, accompanying the Roosevelts to Bad Nauheim and providing
just the sort of masculine comradeship Mr. James had planned. He and
Franklin bicycled together, played tennis and golf, hunted birds, and
tracked animals through the Hyde Park snows. Dumper eventually
rose within the church to become the first dean of Trinity Cathedral
in Newark, New Jersey. He was always reticent about his days with
the Roosevelts, his son recalled ninety years later, but he had admired
Sara "the power in that house, by then" and he had genuinely liked
Franklin, though he always found the buoyant but apparently haphaz
ard way in which his pupil went at his lessons alarmingly "unortho
dox."

Infirmity and old age, rarely discussed but ever present, now pre
vailed at Algonac as well as Springwood. In the spring of 1891, Russell
and Company, the firm that had twice made Warren Delano's fortune
in the China trade, suddenly and unexpectedly failed. The old Delano
home at Macao had to be sold off, and Annie and Fred Hitch, now
jobless, came home to live at Algonac. Later that year, making his slow
way upstairs, Mr. Delano somehow lost his footing and fell, shattering
his good hip. Thereafter, he had to settle for life in a wheelchair. In
December, while the bone was still knitting, word came that his
brother Franklin the rich Uncle Frank after whom FDR was named
had died of a heart attack at his villa near Monte Carlo.

Still, the old man struggled on, sustained by his fond family. Frank
lin and his mother and less often, Mr. James called regularly, and
his grandson often recited verse for him or delivered boyish talks on
local birds while Sara stood by proudly. In 1889, Mr. Delano cele
brated his eightieth birthday, and the assembled family gave him a

The Loving Conspiracy 175

specially bound parchment booklet of pen and ink renderings of scenes
from the nearly nine decades of his life: his leaving Fairhaven for the
city as a boy; his and Catherine's voyage to China; Algonac itself,
sheltered by its big trees. Three years later he insisted on attending the
World's Fair at Chicago, a servant wheeling him among the exhibits.
He was "thrilled" at all he saw, his son Fred recalled, and by "the fact
that he had in his long life attended the opening of the Erie Canal and
witnessed the entire span of ... railway development."

Nor did he or his wife ever let their age or frailty erode their
dignity or their affection for one another. A servant brought a note to
Warren one summer morning toward the end of his wife's life:

Dear Warren,

Will you meet me at the front door to take a drive in the new
phaeton which I have bought as a birthday gift for you?
I am waiting for you,

Your affectionate,
Katie

The Delanos celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in No
vember of 1893. The whole family reassembled at Algonac. Sara and
Mr. James gave the couple a gold-plated muffineer, Franklin offered
a letter opener with a gilt handle, but perhaps the old couple's favorite
gift was a tray engraved with a view of the Lyman house at Northamp
ton, Massachusetts, in which they had been married half a century
before.

Even in her last weeks, frail from the cancer that would finally kill
her, Catherine Delano insisted on being brought downstairs in a roll
ing chair and taken into the library, where Warren sat waiting for her,
trapped in a wheelchair of his own. Nearby hung portraits of them
both, painted in their full vigor just before they sailed for China as
newlyweds. "Though gasping and panting for breath," a visitor
remembered, "she would always be thinking of something pleasant to
tell him." One morning, the same visitor overheard Warren ask her
how she was.

"Rather good for nothing," she answered.

"I am, too," her husband said.

"But, Warren, we were a rare young couple once."

Warren wheeled himself into her bedroom on the evening of Feb
ruary 9, 1896, to say good night, just as he had for years. She was asleep

176 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

when he approached the bed, but she opened her eyes when he leaned
forward to kiss her.

"Good night dear," she murmured. "Good night, goodbye, dar
ling."

She died in her sleep the following morning.

That summer, the last before Franklin was to go off to Groton, he
returned to Bad Nauheim with his father and with his mother, once
again dressed in mourning. Arthur Dumper came, too, and in his
company the boy had several adventures of which he later loved to tell.
In London, where they went first to consult Mr. James's physicians,
he and Mr. Dumper set out one afternoon to visit the bird collection
at the South Kensington Museum, only to find the doors closed. The
Prince of Wales himself was inside, dedicating a new wing. Only those
with invitations could get in; the general public was barred for the day.
Neither at fourteen nor later did Franklin Roosevelt ever consider
himself part of the general public. He strode up to the uniformed guard
and gravely presented his engraved gilt-edged life membership card in
the New York Museum of Natural History. The guard examined it
and then, no less gravely, ushered the young scientist and his older
companion inside.

Later, while Mr. James and Sara took the waters in Germany,
Franklin and his tutor took three or four short bicycle trips through
the countryside. It was the boy's very first experience with handling
money on his own; each day he was given four German marks then
about a dollar with which he was expected to feed and house himself
overnight. His parents were both pleased and surprised to find that he
came home each time with change to spare.

They were still more pleased at how Franklin handled himself
when on his own. He and Mr. Dumper had found themselves under
arrest four times in one busy day of bicycling for picking cherries
along the roadside, for wheeling their bicycles into a railroad depot,
for riding into Strasbourg after dusk (it was then forbidden to enter
"a fortified city of the Empire, on, with, or in a wheeled vehicle after
nightfall"), and finally, for the inadvertent slaughter of a panicky goose
that had thrust its long neck between the spokes of Mr. Dumper's front
wheel. Franklin's good German, his self-assurance, and his well-honed
skill at disarming adults with charm got him and his companion out
of all but the last violation without a fine. The police official before
whom they were brought at Strasbourg was so taken with the young

The Loving Conspiracy 177

American that he served him and his friend wine and cake before
letting them go or so FDR liked to remember. They did finally have
to pay five marks to the angry owner of the goose, however, even
though Franklin always maintained the bird had really "committed
suicide."

All the Roosevelts knew that things would never be quite the same
again for any of them once Franklin left for school in September, and
Sara sought to keep him close for as long as she could. Before returning
to Hyde Park, she took Franklin with her to Bayreuth for several days
to hear Wagner's entire Ring Cycle. Franklin developed a cold and
high fever on the way. She dosed him with the laxative Castoria her
customary curative for anything that went wrong and had him sleep
in her hotel room until he felt better. He was a patient onlooker at the
opera. "Franklin really appreciated it much more than I thought he
would," Sara wrote proudly to her sister Dora. "He was most attentive
and rapt . . . and always sorry to leave, never for a moment bored or
tired."

The day of separation grew closer. The Roosevelts returned home
to Springwood in early September. Mr. Dumper left for the seminary.
Sara carefully supervised the packing of Franklin's belongings, and the
two spent one last long day together. "We dusted his birds," she wrote
that evening, "and he had a swim in the river. I looked on and with
a heavy heart."

The next day, September 15, the three Roosevelts boarded their
private railroad car and set out for Groton. Franklin remained "dry-
eyed and resolute," his mother said, though "white-faced," and he
greeted the rector and his wife with his usual good manners. Nor were
there tears when he finally took leave of his mother and father. They
wanted him to stay at this school, therefore he would stay. His real
feelings remained hidden, but Sara confided hers to her diary: "James
and I feel this parting very much," she wrote. "It is hard to leave my
darling boy."

CHAPTER

GETTING ON VERY WELL
WITH THE FELLOWS

In some ways, the setting of Franklin's new school must have seemed
familiar to him. Like Springwood, Groton's red brick buildings stood
surrounded by an immense grassy clearing edged with deep forest
which tilted down toward the bank of a slow-moving river, the Na
shua. Like Springwood, too, the school was built near enough to town
to provide pleasant walks on crisp fall afternoons, but not so close as
ever to be thought part of it. At night, only the scattering of far-off
village lights beyond the trees reminded Groton boys that there was
another world outside the school.

But there the resemblance ended. Every other aspect of life at
Groton would prove profoundly different from anything Franklin had
known before. Accustomed to the admiring company of adults, he had
now to make his lonely baffling way in an entirely new world of
suspicious, intolerant schoolboys. "I shall be anxious to know how you
get on with the boys/' Sara wrote a few days after leaving him at
school. "It is a great change to be with so many of all sorts."

Franklin's new schoolmates were "of all sorts" only in a severely
limited sense, of course. Groton was already one of the most exclusive
schools in the country; nine out of ten of its students came from
families listed in the social registers of Boston, Philadelphia, Newport,
or New York. Like Franklin, they had been brought up in wealth and
comfort even luxury and Groton's deliberately Spartan atmo
sphere required a considerable adjustment for all of them.

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 179

Franklin was led to his new quarters in Hundred House along a
wide bare corridor, its woodwork stained dark brown. "Durable but
in no sense sybaritic," one graduate remembered. He spent his first
night, and most of his school nights thereafter, in one of the twenty-
four claustrophobic cubicles six by nine feet, with just room enough
for a bed, bureau, and chair that lined both sides of the dormitory
hall. There was no closet; clothes were hung on pegs. No pictures were
permitted on the whitewashed walls. There was a curtain rather than
a door, because the rector frowned upon too much privacy for adoles
cent boys; it led only to trouble.

The change was too much for some. Peabody found one new
arrival, the son of a Manhattan millionaire, weeping on his first day of
school. What was the matter? he asked. "Sir," the boy answered be
tween sobs, "sir, there are no carpets on the stairs." 1

But the boys were given few opportunities for brooding. "Perhaps
the most noticeable feature of life at Groton is that it is very busy," an
early master wrote. This, too, was part of the rector's plan. "The curse
of American school life is loafing," he once said. "The tone of loafers
is always low. . . . The best thing for a boy is to work hard ... to play
hard . . . and then, when the end of the day has come, to be so tired
that he wants to go to bed and go to sleep. That is the healthy and good
way for a boy to live."

The crowded day was punctuated by bells. The first woke the
school at six forty-five, and the boys in each dormitory rushed with
their towels to a big common washroom lined with black soapstone
sinks and taps that ran only cold. This first stop of the day may have
been the most unsettling for Franklin during his early bewildering
days at Groton. Every boy was expected to take an icy shower each
morning. Accustomed to warm languid baths in the big clawed tub
upstairs at Springwood his only tubside companion had been his
mother, years before he now found himself surrounded by two
dozen pushing, shouting naked boys, waiting together in line to suds
themselves with big slippery cakes of ordinary yellow kitchen soap. "I
can never smell that soap without recalling again the first misery of a
new boy," one graduate recalled, "the crowding pressure, the weight

1. Another wealthy Hyde Park boy who attended Groton some years after FDR had moved
on recalled how hard it had it been for him to adjust to the school. "Life on an estate," he told
me, "was the most abnormal way in the world to grow up. Imagine it for yourself: always having
maids and governesses, never seeing the inside of a public school, knowing no one else in town,
unable to cope with the tough, real world outside. It's a wonder how any of us grew up half sane."

Confidential source.

180 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

of numbers, the incessant chatter and clatter, remorseless and unend
ing. One could not escape, could not get back inside of oneself."

A second deep clang of the bell came at seven-thirty, sending
Franklin and his schoolmates, now scrubbed, combed, and dressed in
suits and ties, racing downstairs to breakfast. The day's schedule was
fixed and rigid. Morning chapel began at eight-fifteen, the rector him
self booming out the lesson. There were classes from eight twenty-five
till noon; dinner, with each boy in his assigned seat (Franklin sat next
to the only other new boy in his form); then more classes, sports, a
second frigid shower, supper, evening study in a common study hall
under the eye of one of the masters, evening prayers, and the final
nightly ritual of shaking hands good night with the headmaster and his
wife.

Studies were the least of Franklin's worries. He had been well
prepared and within a month of his arrival stood fourth in his class of
nineteen. His father, "who was so anxious for him to study well," was
very pleased; and except for some trouble with Greek in his second
year, Franklin never had serious academic difficulty. He displayed
"more than ordinary intelligence while at Groton," Peabody once said
of him, and took u a good position in his form but [was] not brilliant."

This last was not necessarily criticism. Brilliance was not highly
prized at Groton; athletic distinction and Christian character always
came first. "I am not sure I like boys who think too much," the rector
once admitted. "A lot of people think of a lot of things we could do
without"; and when a proud mother introduced her son to him as
precociously bookish, he told her not to worry: "We'll soon get that
out of him."

Like most boys, Franklin yearned both to excel at school and to fit
in, but he was ill prepared to do either. More than most boys, he had
been the object of universal admiration and affection from his parents
and grandparents, of course, but also from his father and mother's
friends, his nurses, governesses, and tutors, from the doting servants
at Springwood and Nauheim and Campobello. It had been the natural
order of his childhood world that he be liked by everyone, and he
worked almost desperately to replicate that world at Groton. His
inevitable failure to do so confused and frustrated him, "I always felt
entirely out of things," he admitted to one close friend many years
later, and to his wife he would confess that something had gone "sadly
wrong" at Groton.

At first he set out to do what he had always done so successfully

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 181

please the adults in authority. Ten days into his first term he an
nounced to his parents that he was setting out to win the punctuality
prize, even though "it will be hard work, as one lateness will spoil it."
He did win it at Prize Day at the end of the year and would win it
twice more before he was graduated but it was a hollow triumph. To
be always in his seat, pen poised and apparently eager to learn, when
the bell rang at the beginning of each class may have won him the
respect of his teachers, but it did nothing to help make him popular
with his classmates.

Nor did the fact that for eight long months he earned no "black
marks," the penalties for minor infractions of school rules that other
less well behaved boys piled up routinely. He did not get his first one
for talking in class until mid-May of the following spring. "I am
very glad of it," he told his parents, "as I was thought to have no school
spirit before."

Franklin's mother was powerless to ease his adjustment to the
unforgiving conformist world of schoolboys. It probably never oc
curred to her that a Roosevelt and a Delano would ever find it hard
to win acceptance. Roosevelts and Delanos accepted or rejected others.
The way for him to win friends, she wrote, trying to be helpful, was
to "exert all your good kind instincts in relation to those about you."

Other obstacles barred the way to the universal popularity he
sought. He was slight for his age, weighing barely 100 pounds, and he
spoke with a distinctive accent gleaned unconsciously during summers
spent abroad and which the other boys thought affected and altogether
too "English." His manners were thought overly refined, too. He had
to be told to stop bowing from the waist when he said good night to
Mrs. Peabody each evening; a simple bob of the head was a more
suitably American sign of deference. His sense of isolation was further
intensified because his parents had been unable to part with him until
two years after all but one of his classmates had entered the school.
"The other boys had formed their friendships," he would tell Eleanor
Roosevelt, and he had remained "always a little the outsider."

Finally, there was the humiliating presence of Taddy, now in the
fourth form and universally unpopular. He was a "queer sort of boy,"
one of Franklin's classmates recalled, "much made fun of by his class
mates," and when they found that the new boy was related to him they
inevitably derided him as "Uncle Frank." Franklin was brave about it
"I would sooner be 'Uncle Frank' than 'Nephew Rosy," he wrote
home but it made his time at Groton still more trying.

182 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Very little of his painful struggle for acceptance made its way into
his relentlessly cheerful letters home. "I am getting along finely both
mentally and physically," he had reported in the very first of these,
setting the tone for all those that followed. At his parents' insistence,
he wrote at least two letters a week for four years, and if he forgot to
mail one even for a day his mother and father telegraphed the headmas
ter to make sure he had not fallen ill. There are only the gentlest hints
of trouble in any of them. To his "Dear Papa and Mama," Franklin
continued to present a uniformly sunny picture of people and events,
the world of the "very nice child, always bright and happy," that his
grandfather Delano and his mother and father had always insisted that
he be. 2

Sara would have been still less serene had she known how Franklin
had really been greeted by his schoolmates. One day early that first
term a group of older boys from the fourth form trapped him in a
corner of the corridor and ordered him to dance, jabbing hard at his
ankles with hockey sticks to make sure he stepped fast enough. Frank
lin did better than that. Refusing ever to seem a victim, even to himself,
he pirouetted and toe-danced in apparent high spirits as if he were part
of the fun instead of its object. No one sensed his fear. "He did what
he was told," one eyewitness recalled, "with such good grace that the
class soon let him go."

He got off easy. New boys often faced far worse humiliations.
Fagging was strictly forbidden at Groton, but a strict and unyielding
hierarchy based on seniority was firmly in place. Sixth-form boys were
made prefects and helped the masters keep order. Younger boys were
not to associate with older ones, had in fact to step off the narrow
boardwalk that led from one building to the next if upperclassmen
were seen coming the other way. Even brothers of different ages were
expected to stay away from one another. A few years later, when
Moncure Biddle of Philadelphia took pity on his homesick younger
brother, George, and occasionally walked to town with him or brewed
him a cup of cocoa, his classmates denounced him as a "queer"; rather
than further risk their scorn, he stopped speaking to his brother at all.

Older boys were encouraged to keep an eye out for newcomers
who failed to conform to the school's unwritten standards of behavior
who seemed too "fresh" or insufficiently excited about football or

2. His later personal letters thousands of them written over forty-five years are almost
equally bland, revealing as little as possible of the emotional life of the man who moved the pen.
Even most of those intended for his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt once admitted, were just "letters
to be letters."

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 183

just lacking in the proper "tone." And when necessary, they were
called upon to administer stern correctives. Newcomers like Franklin
secretly quailed at the prospect of undergoing either of the school's
two traditional forms of punishment: "bootboxing" and "pumping."
The first of these was the mildest, usually inflicted by the older boys
without the masters' knowledge. The miscreant was made to fold
himself inside the small airless locker in which he kept his footgear
while the other boys sat and pounded on the closed lid.

Pumping was dreaded more, imposed before the entire school with
the tacit sanction of the rector and only after a solemn, drawn-out
ceremony that made its cruelty all the more excruciating for the victim.
Francis Biddle, who entered Groton the year before FDR left it and
who would much later become his Attorney General, remembered
how it was done: "Immediately after evening prayers the senior prefect
would ring the bell and announce that the sixth form wanted to see
the offender immediately in his study. A little boy got up, walked to
the door in front of the whole school, who watched him and wondered
what he had done or tried not to look at him. They waited there in
silence. No one in the big schoolroom was allowed to move, while
behind the closed doors in the senior prefect's study he was lectured,
told that he was not behaving like a Groton boy, dismissed and as he
walked out of the study the fourth formers [usually led by the brawni
est football players] seized him and rushed him down the back stairs
to the cellar, where he was turned upside down and held under the
gush of a faucet the water power was excellent until he had almost

fainted " Having suffered all the initial sensations of drowning, still

retching and gasping, he was then asked if he fully understood the
seriousness of his offense, and if he failed to be properly enthusiastic
in his apologies or not fervent enough in his promises to do better, the
onlookers would chant "Shut him up! Under again!" and the tap was
turned on a second time. "The victim," Biddle continued, "half-
drowned and dripping, found his way back to his bedroom alone.
... I still vividly remember that moment of black suspense which hung
over me, over all the younger boys, when the rector walked out after
prayers, and the senior prefect announced that the school would re
main seated: Was it to be me?" 3

It was never Franklin. He was neither bootboxed nor pumped.

3. The rector was nothing if not impartial about pumping. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was
pumped twice with Peabody's approval, just three weeks before his father was sworn in as Vice
President of the United States; and his own son, Malcolm Peabody, also once underwent the
ordeal because of his allegedly poor "tone."

184 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Eleanor Roosevelt contended that his sense of isolation at Groton had
helped foster her husband's sympathy for outcasts. If it did, it was in
retrospect. At the time he did all he could to identify as closely as he
could with the majority against the misfits. Within two weeks of his
arrival and in the same letter in which he vowed never to be late to
class he was writing scornfully of Moncure Biddle, then an unhappy
member of the second form, as "quite crazy, fresh and stupid, he has
been bootboxed once and threatened to be pumped several times."
Again a month later: "Poor Biddle has been sent to bed for being saucy

to one of the masters I found it necessary to chastise him yesterday,

but he is just as fresh again today!"

The next fall he reported, "You will be pleased to hear that George
Cabot Ward Low (O! law!) has been pumped, & a pretty sight he was!
He left off swaggering immediately!" 4

Athletic distinction was central to real success at Groton, and
football, wrote a school historian, "was the Groton game par excellence.
. . . Instinctively," he added, the rector "trusted a football player more
than a non-football player, just as the boys did." Football, Peabody
believed, ". . . is of profound importance for the moral even more than
for the physical development of the boys. In these days of exceeding
comfort, the boys need an opportunity to endure hardness and, it may
be, suffering."

Franklin's enthusiasm for the Groton football team was all that the
rector could have hoped. An early letter home began:

Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah

GROTON

46
St Mark's

I am hoarse, deaf and ready to stand on my cocoanut! OUR team played
a wonderful game. . . . 5

4. Francis Biddle reacted much the same way. Pumping's special savagery was entirely lost
on him while at school; he was just grateful it was never done to him, and glad to be among the
punishers instead of the punished. "I was not shocked by it, only frightened. ... I had no sense
of shame or regret, but on the contrary knew the thrill of exercising mob justice and the
excitement which communicated itself to me as I struggled to be in the center of the crowd that
was handling its victim."

Source: Francis Biddle, A Casual Past, page 172.

5. His admiration for Groton athletes was wistfully adolescent. On the backs of group
photographs of the football teams he carefully noted the name and weight of every player.

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 185

But his playing skills were something else again. He had almost
never been on a team of any kind before he first ventured onto the
Groton football field, and he was far too spindly to do well. He was
quickly assigned to the second-worst of eight graded schoolwide
squads; even at that, his mother worried both that he might be injured
facing boys as big as Taddy in the line, and that he "not have the
misfortune of hurting anyone."

He was little better at baseball, and in his first season found himself
on "a new team which is called the BBBB or Bum Base Ball Boys,"
which was made up of "about the worst players in the school." During
its game against a marginally more skilled team called "Carters Little
Liver Pills," he managed to get hit hard in the stomach by a line drive,
he told his parents, "to the great annoyance of that intricate organ, and
to the great delight of all present."

Mr. James, perhaps worried that his boy was too delicate, insisted
during Franklin's second year at Groton that he take six boxing lessons
from a former professional on the staff. He dutifully jabbed and
shuffled through them, then took part in a single two-round fight
against a boy named Fuller Potter in front of the assembled school.
Both combatants left the ring "with bloody noses and cut lips," he
reported, but Potter was judged the winner. Franklin professed not to
be surprised, since "this is the third year [Potter] has boxed, and even
then we were quite close."

Franklin was better at other individual sports, but they all counted
less with masters and boys alike at tennis and golf and at the high
kick, an obscure event peculiar to the school. A tin pan was suspended
from the gymnasium ceiling and raised by measured stages after each
contestant had tried three times to touch it with his foot. By the time
the finalists competed it hung high above the heads of even the tallest
boys, and in order to reach it each in turn had to leap into the air, kick
high, and then crash helplessly back to the hard floor. In the spring of
his first year, Franklin managed to outkick all third-form competitors,
reaching the pan at seven feet three and a half inches "two feet over
my head," even though "at every kick I landed on my neck on the left
side so ... that the whole left side of my body is sore and my left arm
is a little swollen."

Franklin expressed no overt anger at having been sent away to
Groton. "I am getting on very well with the fellows," he wrote home
that first October, when he clearly was not. But there is a curious
undercurrent to his letters from school through all of the four years
he spent there, a litany of complaints about minor ills and injuries that

186 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

must have constituted a subtle and perhaps unconscious revenge upon
the overly anxious parents who had made him attend. In his first year
alone, he claimed to have dislocated a finger ("my hand looked like a
large ball"); cut his eyelid ("I think from a shoe heel"); endured a
"whack" on the nose and another on the head; nursed a bruised "tail"
and injuries to his neck and arm (which he expected to continue to hurt
"for two months or so"); experienced a painful "gumboil [abscess]
which feels about three feet in diameter"; almost fallen from a canoe;
and struggled with a series of sniffles for which his worried mother
regularly sent him bottles of castor oil.

Athletic injuries were badges of adolescent honor, proof that he
was not shirking and could endure pain as well as his classmates could,
even if he was unable to outplay them. And he always described them
in breezy, apparently carefree terms, hedged around with exhortations
not to be overly alarmed: "You need not worry about my getting
drowned, as there is always a master there in a canoe to watch us." But
it also seems obvious that he wanted his mother and father to know
at least something of what he was going through.

Franklin did finally win an athletic ribbon at Groton, as manager
of the baseball team in his final year. He worked hard at it though
he considered managing a "thankless task," a colorless round of rolling
the diamond, readying equipment, making sure the players turned out
for practice and was pleased when his team beat their traditional
rivals, St. Marks, 7 to 6. "All my work is over & over successfully,"
he wrote home, "& there has not been a single complaint." But there
was little individual praise for him, either; the players got the glory.

His mother was proud of his athletic accomplishments, just as she
was proud of everything he did, but Franklin was not fooled. He knew
that, try as he might, he would be remembered at Groton, in the
rector's own words, as "athletically rather too slight for success."

Some sense of the depth of Franklin Roosevelt's disappointment at
not having done better in the arena that counted most at his school may
be seen in the fact that he later felt compelled to lie about it, telling a
newspaper reporter in 191 1 that he had been "quite a boxer" at Groton,
and confiding to his friend Henry Morgenthau in 1939 that while his
doctors thought he had trouble with his sinuses, the real trouble was that
he had twice broken his nose playing football at school.

Groton was undeniably Endicott Peabody's creation, the red brick
embodiment of his rugged, demanding creed. But other masters, too,
influenced Franklin and his fellow students. Two had been there from

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 187

the very beginning the Reverend Sherrard Billings and William
Amory Gardner.

Billings was three years younger than Peabody, a short, black-
bearded, voluble cleric known to the boys as "Mr. B.," u Beebs," or u the
Little Man." He taught Latin, coached football, and took care of the
small details of Groton life for which the headmaster had no time. He
was enormously popular with the boys. It was he, not Peabody, whom
they carried on a chair around the victory bonfire every time Groton
beat St. Mark's; they brought to him questions and complaints they
would never have dared discuss with the rector. Billings preached in
chapel from time to time more eloquently than Peabody, some stu
dents said and admitted to an occasional troubling doubt, to the great
relief of at least some graduates. He led the choir (in which Franklin
sang soprano his first year and tenor his last), and he conducted the
singing of the Groton nonsense song "Blue Bottle" at the annual
School Birthday, waving a carving knife instead of a baton.

For him, good form was essential in everything. "He never ceased
to insist that there is a correct way of doing things," wrote a former
student, "whether of speaking, or shaking hands, or parsing a Latin
sentence." And he believed that no boy should be graduated who had
not first been infused with the responsibilities of citizenship and an
interest in public affairs. To that end, he introduced compulsory debat
ing, a discipline to which Franklin took with eager enthusiasm. He
may have been only a passable athlete and a slightly better than average
scholar, but he had been encouraged to talk since infancy and to discuss
public affairs with his parents and their friends. His first public speech
was a two-minute extemporaneous address on a topic close to his
father's heart, the continuing need for a Nicaraguan canal. Mr. James,
who had himself been an able debater in college, took a keen interest
in all the debates that came after, supplying his son with fat envelopes
of newspaper clippings bearing on his assigned topics the importance
of a bigger Navy, for example, and the case against the annexation of
Hawaii and urging him not to memorize but rather to learn to speak
his mind without notes.

William Amory Gardner "Uncle Billy Wag" to the boys was
something of an anomaly at the school. On the surface he seemed to
be everything a Groton man should not be. A rich Boston orphan, he
had been raised in the huge art-filled home of his flamboyant aunt by
marriage, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and he was a lifelong bachelor,
shrill and utterly unathletic. It was said that when he played bridge
his favorite game he had to stand up and hold his heart out of sheer

188 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

excitement. And he cultivated a wealth of eccentricities of the sort
tolerated only in academics and the very rich. He knitted and wore
luridly colored woolen socks, once greeted a visiting clergyman wear
ing just a pair of fur bedroom slippers, and built for himself a mansion
on the school grounds called "The Pleasure Dome," complete with a
stage, a swimming pool, squash courts, and a maze. Here every Sunday
afternoon he served the boys cake and "google," a sticky-sweet drink
that came in two colors and one flavor lemon.

His unconventionally spilled over into the classroom, often to the
rector's despair. He taught Greek but had a hard time keeping to the
task at hand. Once, a student remembered, "we hit a passage in the Iliad
which mentioned dogs. Wag was off like a bloodhound. He told us
about dogs, which led to architecture in Belgium, the canals of Holland
and New York State, various methods of burying the dead, famous
epitaphs, the Battle of Thermopylae, Aegean steamers, and the unrea
sonableness of publishers. As we left the room he chanted after us in
Greek the twenty-line assignment."

Arriving at another class, he found that the boys had placed his
chair on top of his desk, just to see what he might do. He climbed up
without a word and lectured from there, breaking suddenly into a
hopping dance of mock rage when he discovered the boys had not
done their homework. The class roared and Peabody appeared in the
doorway to chastise Gardner yet again for disrupting the school. As
usual, Gardner offered to resign; as usual, the rector refused to hear of
it.

Gardner's wealth was clearly an asset to Groton. His fortune built
both the small Tudor-style chapel in which Franklin first worshipped
and the majestic Gothic edifice that replaced it and was dedicated
during his last year. But the rector's fondness for him went far deeper
than that. Gardner was in fact a superb teacher, able to convey a richer
sense of the world outside the school than any of the other masters.
"Let the best men," he once wrote, "if they are to teach physics and
chemistry, be men who know a good deal about Homer, Beethoven,
Dante, and Velasquez. If they are to teach classics or history, let them
know something of business, trigonometry, how long it takes a hen's
egg to hatch. . . ."

For a boy with a mind like Franklin's eager for knowledge,
fond of unconnected facts, disinclined to rigor or abstraction
Gardner was a reassuring kindred spirit. He was Franklin's favorite

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 189

teacher. "I can learn better & quicker with him than anyone else," he
told his parents. 6

But it was Endicott Peabody himself whom Franklin professed to
revere. "As long as I live/' he wrote from the White House in 1934,
"the influence of Dr. and Mrs. Peabody means and will mean more to
me than that of any other people next to my father and mother." In
paying such public obeisance to the rector, he was in part simply being
a true son of Groton; he felt about Endicott Peabody pretty much the
way most of the rector's boys had come to feel by the time they left
his care. It is hard after nearly a century to see just what it was about
this tall, plain-spoken, plain-thinking educator that so drew the boys
to him. Not all were so drawn, of course: W. Averell Harriman once
told his father, "You know he [Peabody] would be an awful bully if
he weren't such a terrible Christian"; and the artist George Biddle
dismissed him as "an almost great man" whose stale tenets rewarded
conformists and hypocrites and stifled the truly creative.

He could certainly be forbidding. Six black marks accumulated in
a single week meant a private interview with the rector. It was that
certainty, rather than the penalties he might impose, that kept most
boys in line. His customary greeting to those unlucky enough to be
summoned to his study was "Are you looking for trouble, boy? Well,
here I am!" Franklin never felt his wrath, but just the remote possibility
of it was unnerving. "After dinner today Mr. Peabody called the choir
into his study and we expected a big talking to," a relieved Franklin
once reported to his parents. "But he surprised and delighted us by
saying that he had decided to let the choir go to Southboro' for the
game next Saturday."

And he was sometimes simply absurd. Of all the many sins a good
Christian must avoid, "impurity" was by far the worst, so far as the
rector was concerned, and by it he sometimes seemed to mean sexual
feeling of any kind; he certainly meant any sexual feeling outside of
marriage. He was for many years vice president of the New England
Watch and Ward Society. He barred the works of Voltaire from the

6. "Many-sided men," FDR told an interviewer in 1932, "have always attracted me. I have
always had the keenest interest in five men ... of comparatively modern times." They were
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Count Rumford.
(The last of these is little remembered today; he was Benjamin Thompson [1753-1814], an
American-born genius who combined careers as soldier, statesman, essayist, scientist, and inven
tor and became a count of the Holy Roman Empire. The drip coffeepot is said to be one of his
inventions.) All five pursued political careers while maintaining the broadest possible variety of
other interests precisely as Roosevelt himself sought to do.

Source: Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy, pages 336-337.

190 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Groton library and would not let his boys read Kipling's Stalky and
Co. because he thought the English boarding school it described was
substandard; and he once expressed the impatient wish that Christmas
vacation might be canceled because those boys who attended the thea
ter while at home too often came back to school discussing a not the
merits of the character portrayed, not the problems presented, but the
beauty of the actresses. "

"The rector preached directly at us when he talked about impurity,"
Francis Biddle recalled, "and though he never said what he meant he
looked into our eyes as he towered above us from the chapel pulpit,
beautifully white and clean and healthy and manly, searching out our
hidden secrets." In an effort to smother even the possibility of impurity
among his boys, the most responsible ones were sometimes assigned to
elevate the tone of schoolmates suspected of harboring unsavory
thoughts or indulging in solitary pleasures. Franklin and his closest
friend, Lathrop Brown, were asked to "reform" such a classmate for a
time, sticking close to him even when he walked to and from chapel.

But Peabody could be fond as well as furious, amused as well as
puritanical, a stern but benevolent substitute father to all his boys. He
strode into Franklin's life breathing vigor and certainty, just as the
boy's own father was growing frail and increasingly querulous. (Mr.
James had in fact overexerted himself just bringing Franklin to school
and had to be helped home and kept in bed several days to recover his
strength.) As one who had spent his whole boyhood as part of a loving
and inseparable triumvirate, life on his own at Groton was doubly
difficult for Franklin. No Groton boy struggled harder to get close to
the austere rector or to his more warm and understanding wife. He
was a faithful weekly guest for tea at "Mrs. Peabody's Parlor," and
when in his fifth-form year he was appointed one of two head "mail
niggers" whose task it was to sort the mail, he was especially delighted,
he told his parents, because "the 2 head niggers take breakfast with the
rector twice a year during the term." 7

7 On the general topic of racial equality, turn-of-the-century Groton reflected all the con
tradictions of its time. The word "nigger" to denote those who did life's dirty work was
used without a thought. There were also "chapel niggers" who readied the chapel for daily
services, and "express niggers" who wrestled trunks and delivered packages. Peabody himself,
who believed "that the Anglo-Saxon race should be the predominant one for the good of the
world," invited black spokesmen such as Booker T. Washington and fund raisers from Hamp
ton Institute to address his boys. The favorite songs sung by Groton boys included "The Battle
Cry of Freedom," "Marching Through Georgia" and "De Leader ob Company B," which
begins: (footnote continued on next page)

Miss Liza Jackson loves a coon who belongs to Company B.
He longed to be a soldier in the army.

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 191

Perhaps the closest Franklin ever came to the rector while at school
was during the fifth form, when Peabody offered a sequence of lectures
to prepare him and several other boys for Confirmation. Candidates
met with him once a week in his dark study. Burning logs flickered
and snapped in the fireplace. Peabody sat behind his desk, a lamp softly
illuminating his long earnest face, as he outlined the tenets of his
simple, even primitive faith. His convictions were unsullied by doubt.
He had little interest in theology, no patience with skepticism. A boy
once had the temerity to ask him why he was so sure of immortality.
"Why," he answered in genuine astonishment, "the Bible states clearly
that Christ assured us of life immortal."

Franklin never raised a difficult question. Already steeped in the
serene Episcopalianism of his father and St. James, he followed the
rector's admonitions with special seriousness. He was more slender
than his fellows, less well equipped than many to make his way on his
own, and impelled to conceal all the roiling thoughts and stormy
yearnings of adolescence both by childhood training in reticence and
because of his schoolmates' uneasy scorn for genuine intimacy. Pea-
body's brand of confident Christianity provided a safe harbor.

It also served to reinforce the self-assurance and optimism that had
been bred into Franklin by his father and mother. Peabody exuded an
easy assurance that would one day find its echo in FDR's own. "It used
to bother me when I made mistakes," the rector once said, "and I
wasted a lot of time fretting. Now I have learned that if one does the
best he can in the light of all his available knowledge and judgment,
then . . . there is no use grieving over it. I do the best I can under the
circumstances and go on to something else. One thing at a time, that
is the great thing."

In his 1945 inaugural address, FDR adopted Peabody's own
confidence in the future as his own: "I remember that my old school
master said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untrou
bled: 'Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we
will be rising toward the heights. Then all will seem to reverse itself
and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of
civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the

He said a General Jackson be was bound fo* some day to be.

Said be, a shot or two would never barm me.

Miss Liza, she was powerful mad, said she, Mr. Coon, you makes me sad.

Ij a great big bo-doo ball bits you

It'll neber stop a-going till it goes right froo.

192 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always has an up
ward trend.' "

In any case, Franklin was confirmed not long after his sixteenth
birthday in the winter of 1898. Bishop William A. Lawrence of Massa
chusetts performed the ceremony in the Groton chapel with Sara and
her sister Dora Forbes proudly looking on. Mr. James was not well
enough to come, and Taddy was not present. "You ask if Taddy is to
be confirmed," Franklin had written to his parents some weeks earlier.
"No such happy thing, and altho' he went into one lecture, he has not
been in since, & is as far from the Good Path as ever."

The Good Path led Franklin to join the Groton Missionary Soci
ety, headed by Sherrard Billings, that same year. He and Lathrop
Brown were made responsible for seeing after Mrs. Freeman, an indi
gent eighty-four-year-old black woman, the widow of a Union drum
mer, who lived in a tiny house just off the school grounds. Whenever
it snowed, they plunged through the drifts to dig her out and make
sure her chickens were fed and that there was enough coal for her
stove. Franklin thought her "a dear old thing," and from time to time
thoughtfully provided her with old copies of Punch.

Franklin also accompanied members of the society each week as
they set out by wagon to conduct evening services at schoolhouses and
small churches in the surrounding villages. Franklin was the organist
he could "play four hymns fairly decently," he said and on his first
expedition through a howling March blizzard he and his friends found
that they greatly outnumbered the congregation one small boy and
the man hired to light the stove.

The missionary society also sponsored a summer camp for poor
boys held each summer on Lake Asquam in New Hampshire. Franklin
twice served two-week stints on its "faculty," helping the campers
learn to swim and canoe and sail. They were from the slums of New
York and Boston. "Only the poorest and raggedest are allowed to
come," the Grotonian assured parents who had complained that some
of the very first arrivals had seemed suspiciously well fed and clothed.
There were pickpockets among them, petty thieves, and would-be
tramps. The aim was twofold "to bring a little sunshine and pleas
ure" into the campers' drab lives, and to combat snobbery among
Groton boys. The summer camp, said a school pamphlet, taught "fra
ternal feeling for those who, with all the difference of environment &
education, are yet moved by the same hopes & fears & temptations as
they. The ultimate equality of human beings is impressed in a way not
likely to be forgotten in the years when these members of the faculty

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 193

become men in the community." This last did not always work
smoothly. "The boys readily make friends with the faculty," the
Grotonian reported at the end of one season, "and work fairly well, but
the faculty felt no confidence in their honesty or truthfulness."
Nonetheless, the Groton camp did provide Franklin with his first
fleeting contact with the poor.

Sara thought all this missionary activity splendid. "It will interest
you in doing for others," she wrote to him; "nothing is so helpful to
ourselves as doing for others and trying to sink all selfishness."

But mere unselfishness was never enough for Endicott Peabody.
He had a far grander vision of the role his boys should play in Ameri
can life. One of his motives for establishing his school had been the
hope that it would turn out young men capable of bringing its high
ideals to the reform of government. "How distressing the political
outlook seems to be!" he had told a friend in 1894. "One looks almost
in vain for men who are willing to serve their country. Those who are
not for themselves seem to be hopelessly bound to their party interests,
and the country comes in a certain last. ... It makes me feel like
chucking up everything and making a desperate charge in Politics,"

He never dared do that, but he did make certain his boys got a hefty
dose of current events. Each was required to take part in school de
bates; every issue of the Grotonian included an article on a political
issue "Degeneration in American Public Life," "The Silver Ques
tion," "Civil Service Reform." Prominent reformers were invited to
address the boys. In his first year alone, Franklin heard Jacob Riis,
Booker T. Washington, and a delegation from Hampton Institute
"a quartet of negroes, & a negro lawyer, & an Indian soldier, and one
paleface," he reported who so impressed him that he donated fifty
cents to their cause and wrote home for permission to subscribe a
second half-dollar.

Theodore Roosevelt was another favorite chapel speaker. He was
the man the rector pointed to most often as his exemplar of the gentle
man in government. He and Peabody were friends and mutual admir
ers. The rector had offered the young TR a position on the Groton
faculty in 1 884, and all four of Roosevelt's sons would eventually attend
his school. Theodore Roosevelt's vigorous views on the obligations of
young gentlemen mirrored Peabody's own. "You are not entitled, ei
ther in college or after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have
been to Groton," he told the graduating class one year. Rather, Groton
boys were to be held to "an exceptional accountability. Much has been

194 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

given you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you 1 was

glad to hear the rector when he asked you to be careful not to turn out
snobs. Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse crea
tures than snobs, but none more contemptible."

"If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something
for our land," Peabody once wrote, "it won't be because they have not
been urged."

Franklin would take less urging than most. Nor did he have any
trouble identifying closely with his Cousin Theodore. Just as the obli
gation of service had first been bred into him by his parents, so had
admiration for TR. Twenty-three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt had
made his maiden speech in the Assembly chamber in Albany just six
days before Franklin was born, and as the boy grew he watched the
spectacular rise of the man his mother called "your noble kinsman"
with pride and even awe. The Hyde Park and Oyster Bay Roosevelts
were then still linked by warm family feeling as well as blood, and as
a boy, Franklin had visited Sagamore Hill several times, doing his best
to keep up as TR led his tireless brood up and down a tall sand dune;
the contrast with his own aging father must have been vivid.

The single documented instance of open boyhood defiance of his
parents was sparked in the late spring of 1897, when from far-off
Nauheim and for reasons now forgotten, his mother declined an invita
tion from Cousin Bamie for Franklin to spend the Fourth of July at
Oyster Bay. Franklin was coldly furious: "I am very sorry that you
refused Cousin Bamie's invitation for the 4th and as you told me I cd
make my own plans and as Helen [Roosevelt] writes me there is to be
a large party & lots of fun on the 4th, I shall try to arrange it with
Cousin B. next Wednesday. Please don't make any arrangements for
my future happiness." When Bamie and Helen visited Groton a few
days later, Franklin told them he would come for the holiday, in spite
of what his mother had written.

The next day, Theodore Roosevelt newly appointed assistant
secretary of the Navy himself arrived at the school to speak about his
term as president of the Board of Police Commissioners in New York.
"After supper tonight," Franklin told his parents, "Cousin Theodore
gave us a splendid talk. He kept the whole room in an uproar for over
an hour, by telling us killing stories about policemen and their doings
in New York." TR, too, invited Franklin for the Fourth, and he again
eagerly agreed to come. "I have accepted Cousin Theodore's invita
tion," he told his distant parents, "and I hope you will not refuse that
too." When the time came, he went.

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 195

All three Roosevelts proudly followed newspaper accounts of TR's
exploits in Cuba, and when he and his Rough Riders returned to march
in the great victory parade, Sara and Mr. James stood in the crowd to
cheer him as he passed. The Roosevelts were again all in his camp
when he ran for governor of New York that autumn. Family loyalty
plus his own fierce disapproval of what he called "the silver craze"
among the Democrats persuaded Mr. James to disavow his own
party in favor of a Roosevelt and the Republicans. Sara and Mr. James
attended a crowded rally at the Metropolitan Opera House. "There
were 3000 people jammed in," Mr. James reported; "we had a box";
Rosy was "afraid to go," because although he, too, planned to vote for
TR, he did not want to be seen cheering a Republican in public for
fear it would hurt his future prospects with the Democrats.

FDR wrote that he and all his schoolmates were "wild with excite
ment" at the news of TR's victory, and his parents were almost as
pleased. "Hyde Park gave the Colonel [an] 81 majority," his father
wrote. "Last spring the Democrats carried the town by 91, so we think
we did very well by our cousin."

Franklin's admiration for Theodore Roosevelt turned to emulation
in 1899. When a Boston oculist told him he should wear glasses for his
nearsightedness, he took it upon himself to order two sets of lenses, one
mounted in a gold-rimmed pince-nez precisely like that the colonel
had worn up Kettle Hill; he only rarely wore the other pair.

To be related to Theodore Roosevelt was a mark of distinction at
Groton. To be related to Taddy remained a hideous embarrassment,
daily agony for a boy like Franklin who yearned so fiercely for social
success. Their names were constantly being confused; in his second
year, Franklin was assigned the same cubicle in which Taddy had lived
the year before. "Worse luck!" he wrote home. Taddy skipped lectures
(preferring to "Loaf," according to Franklin), did not study, slipped
away from school and always got caught. On his way back to school
one year he forgot his health certificate. Returning with Franklin from
a ski trek to town on a winter Sunday afternoon, he dropped an entire
bag of oranges one by one along the way, and the two boys had to
retrace their tracks through the snow to pick them up. Many years
later, Mary Newbold Morgan, Franklin's childhood playmate and life
long neighbor, told her son that Taddy had always seemed to her
"dim-witted, inconsequential ... his only topic of conversation . . .
what his pair of socks had cost him." There began to be talk, too, of

196 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

secret drinking. Mary's mother had whispered that the cause was "the
Astor taint," a genetic flaw which was supposed to produce an unfor
tunate eccentric every other generation or so. 8

Sara shared some of her son's scorn for Taddy, and she sometimes
worried about his influence on Franklin. "Do not let Taddy persuade
you that [choir singing] is a bore," she wrote one year, "for he is no
judge. Many things in life bore him and he will lose a great deal by
having such ideas but cannot help it." But she also felt sorry for him.
Such ideas she clearly believed were inherited from his father, whose
preoccupation with amusing himself she always found trying.

The Democrats lost the White House again in 1896, and by the
following spring, Rosy was once again without anything to do. 9 Even

8. The shaky basis for this theory was probably John Jacob Astor's eldest son, John Jacob
II, who lived most of the time in what one observer called "a state of mental stupor," emerging
from time to time to compose idiosyncratic verse. His father built him a house at Ninth Avenue
and Fourteenth Street in New York City, where he lived to be seventy-seven under a doctor's
constant care, taking daily walks in the specially designed walled garden that shielded him from
the gaze of passersby.

Source: Cowles, page 51.

9. The Republican triumph would have put Rosy out of a job in any case, but his years at
the London embassy had not proceeded as placidly as he had hoped. He was skilled enough at
the social side of diplomatic life, but in the summer of 1895 a genuine international crisis
threatened war between Britain and the U.S. and made stringent demands on Rosy's skills as a
political tactitian.

The border between British Guiana and Venezuela was the somewhat unlikely cause. In
1886, Britain had suddenly declared that some 30,000 square miles of what had once been
generally considered Venezuelan territory now belonged to the Crown. The dispute festered for
nine years, neither side yielding an inch. Most Americans sided with Venezuela, and in July of
1895 the U.S. Secretary of State Richard T. Olney sent an official note to London demanding
that Britain submit to arbitration and declaring her in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The
British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, answered in effect that Britain's quarrel with Venezuela
was none of America's business. The impasse took four years to resolve peacefully.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Thomas F. Bayard who had been President Cleveland's Secre
tary of State during his first administration, and whose personal relations with Olney were
anything but cordial was suspected in Washington of being too malleable in his dealings with
the British. To circumvent him during the crisis and to impress upon the British America's
seriousness of purpose Olney secretly made Henry White his unofficial agent. White was
Rosy's predecessor as first secretary, still living in London and intimately acquainted with British
statesmen. Rosy was quietly instructed to make the official embassy cipher book available to
White whenever clandestine messages needed to be passed to or from Washington.

This betrayal of his chief made Rosy uneasy Bayard was an old friend and fellow sports
man who had been one of his sponsors for the London post but he agreed, asking only that
White "not inform me of the nature of his communications."

Rosy evidently lacked something as a conspirator and was quickly found out, so that for
nearly two years he and the ambassador spoke to one another as rarely as possible. "I am not having
an easy time with Mr. B. by any means," he complained to Olney, "and my position is a difficult
one, as he resents bitterly any nonagreement with his policy and ties my hands at every step."

It was an awkward, painful business, and when Cleveland left office in March of 1897 and

you it has not been through unfriendliness but purely as a matter of

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 197

so, he rarely communicated with his troubled son at school, and late
that May Taddy wrote Bamie to ask her if she knew where Rosy was:
"I have not heard from my father for over a month," he said, "and have
no idea of his whereabouts. Our paper said he had sold all his horses
and had started for Paris. The papers are ... more informed on the
subject than we are."

He had, in fact, gone to Marienbad to take the cure for one of his
many elusive illnesses before coming home to Hyde Park in the late
summer. There, Sara confided to Franklin that "brother Rosy" occu
pied himself with "an extraordinary tricycle with a machine part elec
tric and part naphtha with which he rides all over the country. It is
very useful as he has no horses yet and it amuses him! This is only a
side remark for you alone. " 10

Taddy was almost pitifully grateful for any attention from anyone.
When Sara sent him an Easter card, Franklin reported, "he told me
that you were much kinder to him than his own family." Bamie, too,
did her best to provide the warmth and support that Rosy's children
needed but got only sporadically from their father, but even she could
only do so much, and when she and Commander Cowles had their
only child, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., in 1898, Franklin wrote to his
mother, "I fear Helen and [Taddy] will be rather left in the cold."

Franklin had no such fears for himself. The wrench of separation
had been at least as great for his parents as it had been for him, and
they never ceased to worry about him; every detail of his life at school
absorbed them. It was cool in Hyde Park the day Sara and Mr. James
returned from leaving Franklin at school for the first time. "I hope you
have put on your flannels," his mother wrote to him that evening. "Do

judgment. My feelings toward you are only those of kindness and regard." Bayard evidently did
not respond.

Sources: Rosy's letters to Olney and Bayard are among his papers at the FDRL, The murky
story of the Venezuelan crisis is told from various points of view in Alan Nevins, The Life of
Henry White; Charles Callan Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard: 1885-1897; Henry
James, Richard Olney and His Public Services. (Rosy himself cooperated with James in writing
this last volume, as two letters from James to him attest, FDRL.)

10. Sara's private impatience with her husband's firstborn was shared only with Franklin.
In Rosy she saw displayed all the weaknesses she and Mr. James had worked hard to insure would
not affect their boy frivolousness, hypochondria, fearfulness, ostentation. It seems clear that she
thought him an unworthy heir to her husband's name and reputation. But there were limits even
to the confidences between mother and son, and at least once Franklin went too far. When Rosy
was operated on for hemorrhoids in 1898 and seemed to take forever to recover, Franklin made
schoolboy jokes about it in his letters home: "What a time you must have had with Brother Rosy!
I hope it won't recur annually like a sort of bloom in the spring!" Sara was not amused, and
Franklin apologized to her for having been too vulgar. Rosy's "temperament is not exactly
conducive to bearing pain," he added, comfortable in the shared knowledge that his was.

198 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

not catch cold. It would be so trying for you and put you back, and
then I should be so anxious." She felt as if he would walk back into
the house at any moment, she added. "It makes me miserable to go to
your room and to look at your clothes and things."

Sara kept each of his letters in her pocket, she told him, and read
them over and over whenever she was alone; she also corrected his
spelling and supplied words his schoolboy haste sometimes made him
leave out before filing them away for the future. Sara thought about
him constantly, visited Groton often (with and without Mr. James),
asked her sister Dora's brother-in-law Charles Forbes to paint a portrait
of Franklin, dusted his stuffed birds herself ("as I dare not trust it to
anyone"), agonized with him over having his teeth straightened, ex
horted him to dress warmly and drink milk each evening ("please never
omit it"), to take his cod liver oil, to be especially careful playing
football, and to be "sweet with Taddy. I want him to be fond of you."
And when he needed shoes she sent him a new pair, serenely sure that
they would fit: "You see a mother's eye can always see inwardly the
size of the child's foot and everything about him!"

Franklin dutifully agreed to all his mother's strictures, and he asked
that his parents send him photographs of themselves for his desk a
standard one of Mr. James, but of Sara "the little picture of yourself
in the little heart-shaped frame on my bureau." Although his letters
were always addressed to both of his parents, they were really meant
mostly for her, and as his father's health deteriorated, increasingly
filled with concern that Mr. James not become overtired. Franklin told
her everything about his life at Groton that he thought she would like
to hear, and kept to himself nearly everything disappointing, awkward,
ambivalent.

He and his mother were more and more on their own now, and
he fantasized that he, not Mr. James, had become her protector. When
she was knocked down by a Manhattan bicyclist in front of Bamie
Roosevelt's brownstone, she was not seriously hurt, "tho' rather ner
vous," but her sixteen-year-old son was enraged. "I am so sorry you
were knocked down by that horrid bicycle," he wrote home. "I would
have given anything to have been there, as the bicyclist would have
been the jarred party instead of you, and he would have found out that
I took a few boxing lessons last winter."

Franklin's parents worried most about his health. Perhaps because
he had so rarely been exposed to other children and the standard
diseases of childhood before going away to school, he seems to have

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 199

been susceptible to every Groton germ. He suffered not only from
frequent colds and chronic sinus trouble, but also from prolonged
sieges of measles and mumps, for each of which he was sent home to
Hyde Park for several weeks of his mother's loving care.

But Mr. James's health continued to come first with her. The
winter of 1897-98 had been a grim one for Sara. All three of the most
important figures in her life had fallen ill and she had to nurse them
all. When Franklin arrived home for Christmas, he found his father in
bed, pale and enervated from yet another heart attack. His grandfather
Delano had already sent word that he was no longer up to presiding
over the traditional family dinner at Algonac; a week later he devel
oped pneumonia. Franklin himself came down with indigestion, spent
several days in his room, and was late returning to Groton.

Back there on January 16, Franklin got word from his father that
his grandfather was growing steadily weaker: "It is only a matter of
hours," The old man died the following day. Sara had been at his
bedside, helplessly watching as the father whom she very nearly wor
shipped slipped away. "I could think only of 'Peace, Perfect Peace,'
when I saw the beautiful calm face," she wrote in her diary when it
was over. "Franklin loved and admired his grandfather. We are thank
ful he is old enough to remember him always."

Whether or not Franklin understood the full depth of his mother's
feelings for her father, he knew she needed to be comforted. "To my
darling Mama," he wrote that evening. "You can never imagine how
deeply grieved I was to hear that my darling grandfather had passed
away. I know you are heartbroken, but we must remember that he has
gone to a better place than this earth, and will be far happier there.
... I only wish I could have been near you in our great trouble." He
was excused from school two days later to attend the funeral and stood
alongside his mother at the Fairhaven graveside.

Still recovering slowly from his Christmas illness, Mr. James had
been too frail to attend. He needed to rest, Sara thought, and then
should return to Nauheim as soon as he was able to travel. She hated
to leave her boy behind; they had all planned to go to Germany
together in July, just as they had in earlier summers. But this was an
emergency; "nothing but James' health would induce me to cross the
ocean without Franklin!" Her son understood her concern and urged
his parents to go on without him: "Papa must not put off going."

Before she left, Sara wrote directly to the rector with instructions
as to how her son was to be cared for should he fall ill in her absence:

200 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

"I trust sincerely that Franklin will keep well, but I must beg that in
case of any illness he may have a room alone. When he is ill he needs
sleep and rest and quiet which with his nature is impossible if he is in
a room with other boys."

The elder Roosevelts set sail for Europe accompanied by a maid in
late April of 1898, just a few days before the war with Spain began.
That event about which Franklin and his schoolmates, he said, were
"wildly excited*' helped inspire one of the most commonly re
counted and least plausible of all the stories from his childhood.
Within hours of the declaration of war, Franklin, Lathrop Brown, and
another classmate had decided to run away together and join the
fighting or so FDR always claimed. The Navy was recruiting young
men at Long Wharf in Boston, just thirty-five miles away, but to make
their way there the boys first had to find a way to leave the school
grounds without being seen by the masters. A pieman who visited the
school twice each week peddling cookies and cakes and pies to the boys
provided the answer. Franklin and his friends bribed him to allow
them to ride off the school grounds inside his wagon. On April 28 they
were all set to climb aboard sometimes FDR liked to say they were
aboard when they developed the burning throats and racking chills
of scarlet fever, then raging through the school. They went instead to
the Groton infirmary.

FDR often told this tale with extravagant embellishments, hinting
that he and his companions had planned to join Theodore Roosevelt
in Cuba rather than enlist in the Navy, though TR himself was still
a civilian when Franklin fell ill, and more than a week away from
resigning his post at the Navy Department. But even the basic story
has all the earmarks of fiction. It seems unlikely that any sane pieman,
dependent for his living on regular access to a steady supply of hungry
Groton boys, would have risked the headmaster's anger let alone
possible criminal charges by agreeing to spirit away three of his
students, and especially not in exchange for the very modest sort of
bribe three schoolboys could manage to put together out of their
allowances. Nor does it seem possible that a boy like Franklin, so
consistently concerned about the danger of alarming his ailing father,
would ever have seriously considered going into combat against his
parents' wishes.

Like so many of FDR's family stories, this one seems to represent
what he wished had happened rather than what did. Perhaps he and
Brown did discuss going off to war in a moment of boyish patriotism,

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 201

but for FDR to claim that they ever actually tried to make such a break
seems to have been still another example of his desire to remember his
basically placid boyhood as having been eventful and adventuresome. 11

But if the aborted Cuban adventure was largely imaginary, Frank
lin's illness was all too real, and terrifying to his far-off parents. They
first learned of it on May 2 in London when two cablegrams arrived,
one from Annie Hitch, the other from Rosy. Franklin had suffered a
"slight attack scarlet fever"; "no anxiety whatsoever." His mother and
father were not reassured. "James is so upset," Sara wrote, "that I dare
not show how I feel." But when a cablegram came the next day from
Peabody himself saying that Franklin was recovering nicely, she
added, "I am so anxious for James to take his cure that I encourage him
to stay and not go home." They pushed on fearfully for Nauheim.

The Roosevelts arrived there on the sixteenth and had just settled
into their hotel Mr. James had been put to bed when a cablegram
arrived saying that Franklin had developed "inflamed kidneys." Sara
woke the maid and together they repacked their trunks. Mr. James was
told the bad news in the morning and all three set out immediately for
home.

The eight-day ocean voyage seemed endless. Sara spent most of it
in her cabin, and when the Teutonic nosed at last into the New York
dock on May 25 and she spotted Fred and Annie Hitch and Franklin's
godmother, Nellie Blodgett, in the crowd "all so cheerful in expression
... my nerve gave way with relief" and she wept.

She and Mr. James reached Groton the next day to find "darling
Franklin very thin and very white but better." Because of the danger
of infecting her husband, Sara wrote, "I have to choose between going
in to him and staying in and deserting James or merely seeing Franklin
thro' the window and being with James. As the infirmary is full and
F's room has 2 other boys and 2 nurses in it, I decide not to go in."

Instead, she stood on a box placed beneath the window and later
spent hours reading aloud to him from the top of a rickety stepladder,
much to the amusement of Mr. James. Sara saw nothing funny in it.
"Franklin loved to see me appear over the window ledge," she remem-

1 1. Evidence for the runaway plot is scant and confusing. Not a word of it appears in Sara
Delano Roosevelt's journals. It first appeared in print in Ernest K. Lindley's early biography,
Franklin D. Roosevelt (page 52), and its source must have been FDR himself. Versions of it also
appear in Sara's My Boy Franklin (pages 42-46) and in Rita Kleeman, Gracious Lady (page 196).
Finally, FDR himself told the story to "a Broadway columnist" (probably Walter Winchell),
from whose account it is retold on page 1 of The Real FDR, edited by Clark Kinnaird. Curiously,
all three of these accounts attribute the plot's fizzle to measles which FDR suffered from in 1 897,
a full year before the Spanish-American War began rather than to scarlet fever.

202 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

bered, u and, at first sight of me his pale little face would break into a
happy albeit pathetic smile."

When he was well enough, she took him home to Springwood,
where he was cared for by the same nurse who had looked after
Warren Delano in his final illness. Sara never forgot how proud she
had been when the nurse told her that Franklin constantly reminded
her of his late grandfather. There could be no higher praise. 12

When Franklin returned to Groton to begin his final sixth-form
year in September 1899, things seemed at last to be going his way.
Taddy had moved on to Harvard. "For several years he was extremely
troublesome," the headmaster had written of him in what was a re
markably pallid college recommendation. "He is occasionally eccen
tric and difficult to deal with. He has a conscience . . . [but] I do not
feel sure of him." He was gone in any case, and Franklin looked
forward to a year without him.

Like almost half his classmates, Franklin was chosen to be a dormi
tory prefect and proved kind and helpful to the new boys, whom he
now loftily called "infants" or "the kids." He was awarded one of "the
five best single studies," too, a real room at last, for which his mother
sent him an embroidered sofa cushion and a framed engraving by
Dore. And partly because the rector had seen fit to award this prized
room to him, he was fairly confident he would soon be made a senior
prefect, one of the nine or ten boys whom Peabody believed displayed
the highest qualities of leadership in the school and with whom he
conferred daily.

He managed to make the second football squad as well and
though he rarely left the bench during games wrote home exultantly:
"Football bruises, afternoon teas, lack of sleep, gossip & engagements
come thick and fast ... a glorious time."

The younger boys all admired him. George Biddle, three forms
behind Franklin, remembered him as "gray-eyed, cool, self-possessed,

12. Sara knew her boy well, and her warning to the rector that Franklin not be expected
to recuperate peacefully in a room with other patients turned out to have been fully justified. He
had been quarantined with two other boys when he first fell ill. All three had been making
"satisfactory progress," she said many years later, "until one of them I'm afraid it was Franklin
put a highly nefarious plan into action. Their nurse, a waddly, good-natured soul, used to make
frequent trips into the ward . . . and no sooner was her back turned than they would hitch on
to her starched skirts, and, with her first move in the opposite direction, send the beds, which
were on casters, shooting across the highly-waxed floor. This performance, repeated at frequent
intervals, so aggravated Franklin's condition that he was soon in the throes of a relapse."

Source: My Boy Franklin, pages 42-43.

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 203

intelligent . . . [with] the warmest and most friendly and understanding
smile." His younger brother, Francis, then in the still more lowly
second form, recalled Franklin simply as "a magnificent but distant
deity."

And he continued to be admired by those older than he. At Cam-
pobello he supervised the Golf Club course, often won tournaments
competing against older players, and was thought so mature, energetic,
and responsible at eighteen the following summer that he was asked
to be both secretary and treasurer. (Even his mother thought this too
much responsibility for her son and urged him respectfully to decline;
he accepted instead, and when she offered to help with the paperwork,
gently refused that, too, insisting on handling it all himself.)

His charm and energy made younger boys look up to him and
delighted adults, but with boys his own age the constituency he
sought most eagerly to please he was still not really popular. "They
didn't like him," Eleanor Roosevelt once told an interviewer. u They
had to give him a certain recognition because of his intellectual ability.
But he was never of the inner clique."

He may have known more than most boys about the bigger world
beyond Groton, but they knew far more than he about being boys.

His demeanor had a lot to do with it. The easy charm and cordiality
that so pleased his mother and delighted his parents' friends bright,
eager, offhand, instinctive seemed artificial to many of his contempo
raries studied, smooth, even oily. And there was more to it than that.
One classmate recalled that by the end of his time at Groton, Franklin
had also "developed an independent cocky manner and at times be
came very argumentative and sarcastic. In an argument he always liked
to take the side opposite to that maintained by those with whom he
was talking. This irritated the other boys considerably."

But that attitude itself may have been born of frustration, a means
of expressing anger he otherwise repressed. Sarcasm was a natural
weapon for an intelligent, bewildered, articulate boy who believed he
was somehow being victimized, cheated of the exalted status that ev
erything in his upbringing had taught him would be his by right. If
he was not doing as well as he believed he should, others must be at
fault. He could not be.

That pattern seems to have been established early, in the autumn
of his second year at school, when he failed an examination in Greek,
then delayed telling his parents about it, finally informed them (claim
ing he "forgot" what had happened for a time), while accusing his

204 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

teacher of having been unjust: "Not only was the paper unfair but the
marking was atrocious and altho' I got about .50 the old idiot Abbott
refused to pass me as is customary when one almost passes." (Mr. James
found this failure "too provoking" in his single documented instance
of even mild irritation with his boy. Franklin must do better or be put
back, he warned, and "imagine, my son, FDR, stepping down to a
lower form!" But his father could not stay angry with him long; the
rest of his letter concerns the doings of a new puppy and the flattering
things visitors had said about the new portrait of Franklin, now hung
on the Springwood landing.)

Such excuses, perhaps put forward as much to convince himself as
to persuade his parents, would blanket his shortcomings wherever they
occurred at school. According to him, the boys who outran or out-
boxed or outkicked him were invariably too experienced or too big to
have provided fair competition; if he slipped in the academic standings
it was because of the arrival of two "horribly clever" new boys. And
if he thought distorting the truth would go undetected, he did not
hesitate to try that, either. He told his parents he had "tottered in"
fourth in a field of 100 boys who took part in an all-school six-mile
paper chase in his sixth-form year, knowing that the Grotonian would
list only the first three finishers in its columns; and when that magazine
rejected his plan for an article on the Dreyfus case, he reported that
it had been because "they had one [on the same subject] about a year
ago" although they had not.

Many years later, some of Franklin's classmates, distrustful of him
and hostile to his presidency, would charge that FDR had lacked
"sincerity of purpose" even at Groton; perhaps it was excuses and
exaggerations like these they had in mind.

The sixth-form play scheduled for February of his final year
seemed to Franklin to offer a chance for real distinction at school. The
seniors were to present W. S. Gilbert's musical farce The Wedding
March An Eccentricity in Three Acts. Franklin first tried out confi
dently for the second male lead "in which I appear constantly, have
little to say but lots of acting" but failed to land it. Then he audi
tioned for a female lead. He had nearly reached his full height of six
feet one and a half inches now and sang tenor, not soprano, in the
choir, but he was still so slender as to seem almost willowy the school
doctor had prescribed a daily snack of crackers and an egg milk shake
to add weight and like many boarding school boys of his time he
seems to have been intrigued by the possibility of such a masquerade.

Getting on Very Well 'with the Fellows 205

(In 1898 he had sent home photographs of that year's class play so that
his parents could see for themselves "what good girls boys make!") But
a friend of his, Kerr Rainsford, got the part. "It seems hard," Franklin
wrote, "as there are so few girls and I am sure I could do as well as
Kerr. As it is now, I doubt if I get a good part at all, and [the director]
is being bullied by his Boston friends (!) to give them all the best parts."

He had abandoned hope when "joyful news" the boy slated to
play a country bumpkin called Uncle Boppady fell ill with rheumatic
fever and Franklin was asked to fill in. "I suppose it is criminal to
rejoice," he wrote home, "but I can't help it! I've got his part and it's
one of the best of the play!!!!"

Nothing in his Groton years so excited him as his part in this
production. Letter after letter flew home, filled with requests for old
clothing from which to compile a costume (two big boxes of his
father's discards were eventually dispatched to Groton) and pleas that
no one be told anything about the play in advance: "Remember, Mum 's
the word. Impress the importance of it on Papa, as it would spoil
everything to have it known!" Sara and Mr. James traveled to Groton
to see one performance and were so pleased they stayed over to see
their boy again the next night. "Franklin acted and sang well," Sara
noted, and the Grotonian concurred: "Uncle Boppady is deaf and
Roosevelt imitated very cleverly a deaf man's voice. . . . Roosevelt did
very well and looked like an old print in his beginning of the century
costume."

Franklin's pleasure in his triumph lasted less than a month. The
rector himself, whose "tyrannical way" Franklin had already de
nounced to his parents at least once, passed him over for senior prefect
in late March. He was bitterly resentful "Three more prefects made
today," he wrote home, "but I'm glad not to be one after the choice.
Harold Peabody (what a swipe), Jack Minturn!!! & Harry Markoe
who is all right. Everyone is wild at the Rector for his favoritism to
his nephew, but the honor is no longer an honor & makes no difference
to one's standing."

In fact he was still upset by it weeks later, talked it over with his
mother over Easter vacation, and when he returned to school for the
last time in April she was still doing her best to comfort him. "Do not
worry over certain things," she told him; "life is full of that sort of
thing and we must be above caring. Only keep up your position and
character and let no one make you feel small, go ahead your own way,
and be kind to every one if you have the chance, and be humble

206 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

minded to your superiors in years and to your parents who live for you
and in you."

Excitement over the coming year helped blunt his disappointment
during his final weeks at Groton. Like all but two of his classmates,
Franklin would go on to Harvard. He and Lathrop Brown had agreed
to live together in Cambridge, and while boating on the river discussed
how they would arrange their college rooms. They had already put
down a deposit on a suite in Westmorly Court, a private and exclusive
dormitory on Mount Auburn Street.

But as graduation neared, Franklin grew nostalgic, too. In grati
tude for their victory over St. Marks, the rector and his wife took the
baseball team and its manager on a special picnic; all "had a roaring
good time," Franklin said, eating their lunch spread out on the grassy
summit of a hill while admiring "the most glorious view." In the
annual Memorial Day parade to the Groton village cemetery, he led
a company of boys, all wearing straw hats, dark jackets and white
trousers and marching in careful cadence to the music of the school's
fife and drum corps. American flags flew overhead in the warm spring
sun, and Endicott Peabody himself rode at the front on a huge white
horse.

And on Prize Day, June 24, Franklin was given the prize for having
written the best essay in Latin, a forty-volume set of Shakespeare. Mr.
James had not been well enough to attend, and Sara had not dared
leave his side. But, she wrote, "I can see it and/^7 it all." "You may
imagine I feel rather tickled," Franklin reported home. " 'The strife is
o'er, the battle won!' " he continued. "What a joyful yet sad day this
has been. Never again will we hold recitations in the old School, and
scarce a boy but wishes he were a 1st former again. ... I can hardly
wait to see you but feel awfully to be leaving here for good."

In later years, FDR would rarely pass up an opportunity to heap
praise upon his old school and its headmaster. The rector performed
the marriage ceremony that united him with Eleanor Roosevelt. FDR
saved every one of the forty-odd birthday postcards Peabody sent him
over the years, dispatched all four of his own sons to Groton making
sure they entered the school properly at twelve, not fourteen, and, like
Mr. James, sometimes providing them with material with which to win
their debates. The President lobbied hard to have the rector awarded
an honorary degree from Cambridge, his English alma mater, in 1935.
Peabody, he told the American ambassador to London, was "the

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 207

unquestionably outstanding private school Headmaster in the United
States." And he invited him to officiate at private religious services on
the eve of each of his four inaugurations as President not, as one
cynic suggested, because Peabody was "a nice old man who needed a
ride on a train," but out of unfeigned affection and respect. "I count
it among the blessings of my life," he once told the rector, "that it was
given to me in formative years to have the privilege of your guiding
hand and the benefit of your inspiring example ... for all that you have
been and are to me I owe a debt of gratitude which I love to acknowl
edge."

And Peabody returned the favor, defending the President against
bitter criticism from his former schoolmates. He was duty-bound to
vote for Hoover in 1932, then believing him the "abler man," but
FDR's victory did not displease him. That spring, Franklin Roosevelt,
Jr., had been elected senior prefect at Groton his father had been
delighted, especially when his son had told him that the only way FDR
could equal that feat was to be elected President and at six in the
morning following election day he was asleep in his study at school.
The light snapped on. "Roosevelt, wake up!" The rector stood in the
doorway in his long white nightshirt. "Yes, sir," Franklin, Jr., said,
blinking back sleep and swinging his feet onto the floor. "Your father
was elected President of the United States yesterday," Peabody said.
"The first Groton student to be so honored and very much in the
tradition of Groton School." He left the room without another word,
but he was always for Roosevelt after that, a little gingerly about
specific New Deal policies, perhaps, but strenuously vouching for his
former student's sincerity and religious conviction, and persuaded that
FDR's actions had helped immeasurably to "save this country from the
serious attacks made upon it by extreme radicals."

When the New York alumni gave the rector a dinner at the Union
Club on his eightieth birthday, he closed his remarks by saying, "I
believe Franklin Roosevelt to be a gallant and courageous gentleman.
I am happy to count him as my friend." Not one of his hosts clapped.

Yet, as was so often the case with FDR, things were not quite as
they seemed. He had not always admired the rector while actually
under his care, and in later years he liked to tell schoolboy stories that
cast the old man in a less than flattering light. "From the president's
conversation," his aide William Hassett noted in his diary, "[I] have
always gained the distinct impression that he liked Peabody better in

208 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

the years after Groton than when he was a boy there. I guess that has
been the experience of more than one schoolboy."

But FDR was in fact different from all of Peabody's other school
boys. He alone had become President of the United States, and perhaps
in his pleasure in that unique distinction lies the secret of his relentless
public fealty to the rector. Franklin had not been well liked at Groton.
Nor had he achieved there the status he had expected would be his,
or grown as close as he would have wished to the headmaster and his
wife. Worse, he knew that his old schoolmates knew it. Now, as
President, he was able to do what none of them could do: summon the
rector to his side and bask publicly in his authentic if belated approval.

In the spring of 1934 he agreed to attend the school's fiftieth
birthday celebration. For the rector's sake, even the President's most
adamant opponents among the alumni agreed to treat him more or less
affably, as just one of the more than 400 graduates on hand for the great
occasion. But it was not made easy for them. When the President's
motorcade, led by a squadron of Massachusetts state police on motor
cycles, turned in from the highway and Roosevelt's big open Packard
pulled up in front of Hundred House, there was a patter of applause
from the assembled guests, but Mrs. Peabody could not contain her
genuine pleasure. She rushed down the steps ahead of her more re
served husband and threw her arms around the President before he
could be helped from his car. "Franklin, dear boy," she exclaimed as
she kissed him. "I am so glad to see you!"

Worse was to come. At the last moment, the rector decided that
all his guests should have the honor of meeting the President, and a
receiving line formed up in front of the headmaster's residence. A good
many alumni were privately appalled. One of the most exercised was
the Wall Street broker Fuller Potter (Groton '01). Franklin Roose
velt's political career both mystified and angered him. He had after all
outboxed Franklin in 1898, had been the star second baseman on the
1900 team Roosevelt had merely managed, and had found FDR's
election as governor four years earlier simply an embarrassment to the
school. No true Groton man would ever have allied himself with
Tammany. "I can't understand this thing about Frank," he had said
then. "He never amounted to much at school."

Embarrassment had changed to anger over the intervening four
years. FDR's ascendancy to the nation's highest office would have
seemed a bad joke were it not so dangerous, a calamity as serious as
the Crash of 1929. The new President's decision to close the banks, he

Getting on Very Well with the Fellows 209

believed, had been just a hint of the Bolshevik-style revolution the
malleable new President's sinister advisers were trying to bring about,
and there had even been muttering among his friends of the need for
assassination. Potter had forbidden such talk in his own house. He
would not sink to "That Man's level, at least not that far down," he
said; besides there were "other ways of handling the problem," as he
planned to demonstrate publicly if FDR dared attend the Groton
anniversary.

Potter's vehemence had so alarmed his son Jeffrey, then himself a
Groton student, that he gently suggested it might be best if his father
stayed away. His father said no; he would come. He owed it to the
rector to be there. (His feelings about Peabody had not changed since
he had done so well against St. Marks by keeping in mind each time
he came to bat how much a Groton triumph would mean to the
rector.) But he would not be afraid to show just how he felt about
Franklin Roosevelt. "You know how hard I have always played," he
told friends, "and I'll take care of it my own way."

Several of Potter's friends winked and patted him on the back as
he and Jeffrey joined the end of the reception line. Some wished him
luck. One told him, "Don't let us down." He stood very straight as the
line moved slowly forward, his face pale, fists clenched. Jeffrey was
terrified at what his father might do and was not reassured when he
looked ahead and saw that the Secret Service men were "in just the
wrong place too far away to stop [his father] but near enough to catch
him." He closed his eyes as they edged along, and began to pray.

They reached the bottom of the steps. The school bell rang. And
at that instant the boy heard the President "shouting Father's name
and his first name at that. . . . There was laughter behind us. The
President called to him to come up here and give him the hand that
won the St. Marks game."

Jeffrey opened his eyes and looked up to see his father now
"looking small but smiling" squeezed in between the old headmaster
and the big grinning man who had at last become his prize pupil.

CHAPTER

UNDER THE INFLUENCE
OF HIS MOTHER

Sara Delano Roosevelt took a photograph of Franklin and Mr. James
on the porch of their Campobello home sometime during the summer
of 1900. In it, father and son sit together in the sun on a rustic-style
seat made of unfinished tree limbs, both dressed warmly against the
chill sea wind. Franklin is taller than his father now, and sits with a
newspaper across his lap, slender and a little solemn in sweater, coat,
and tie, his hair parted precisely in the center. Mr. James wears a straw
skimmer and sits up as straight as he can, but he is clearly very frail
too weak even to make his way back to Nauheim. His carefully
tailored tweeds hang loosely on his thin shoulders. His neck no longer
fills his collar, and some sort of deep discoloration has stained the
whole right side of his face.

This was to be the last summer the three Roosevelts would have
together.

Mr. James had suffered two major disappointments in the past few
years. First, the Nicaraguan Canal project the third and last of his
schemes to make himself immensely rich finally collapsed in 1899,
superseded by the canal to be built across Panama. He took the news
with his usual equanimity about business matters; it had been a gamble
and gambles did not always pay off. Nothing irreplaceable had ever
been at risk. But he had been genuinely saddened in the autumn of
1898 when his big yacht, the Half Moon, mysteriously blew up and
sank as she was being towed up the Hudson to Hyde Park. "She was

Under the Influence of His Mother 211

in all her details and auxiliary power a creation of my own," he told
Franklin, "as no boat was ever built like her. ... I am so disheartened."
Franklin had been saddened, too, and worried over the disaster's im
pact on his father's health. He offered to sell his knockabout, the New
Moon, to help pay for a replacement, a gesture which Mr. James gently
refused but thought wonderfully "unselfish."

He still did his best to maintain the standards that had always been
so important to him. Shortly after Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Vanderbilt
moved into their monumental villa on the site of Dr. David Hosack's
old house in Hyde Park in 1898, a servant had brought to Sara at the
dining-room table a hand-written note from her new neighbor.

"Mrs. Vanderbilt has invited us to dinner," she told her husband.

"Sallie, we cannot accept."

"But she's a lovely woman," Sara answered, "and I thought you
liked Mr. Vanderbilt."

He did, Mr. James said; they had served on the same boards of
directors together and got along well. That was not the point: "If we
accept we shall have to have them at our house." 1

He was still capable of rallying his spirits. The way his new eight
een-ton auxiliary schooner was being fitted out soon absorbed him, and
Sara had given him a fine new saddle horse named "Bobby" "a
beauty, only five years old and kind and gentle . . . Kentucky-bred."

But there had been growing signs of fretfulness as well. A quarrel
with a neighbor over a few feet of beachfront had made him threaten
for a time never to return to Campobello. The servants sometimes
made him peevish, and when he learned that Todd, his latest English
butler, had quietly answered an advertisement for a new position, he

1. FDR loved to tell this story, always prefaced by a plea that Mr. James not be misunder
stood: "He was the most generous and kindly of men, and always liberal in outlook My father

was no snob."

Relations with the Hyde Park Vanderbilts were polite Sara and Mrs. Vanderbilt even
became friends but the Roosevelts continued privately to think of their neighbors as gaudy
newcomers, overly anxious to impress. William Hassett recorded a tale that both Rosy and the
President enjoyed retelling. Rosy had once been Mrs. Vanderbilt's dinner guest. "At the appro
priate time the dinner was halted. The butler, in full livery, approached and called out in solemn
tones, 'A cable from King Edward/

" 'Dear old Knollys,' said Mrs. Vanderbilt. 'How lovely of him [reading]. He's thanking me
for my birthday greeting to the king/ " Even Rosy found this evidence of intimacy with the royal
family stirring until he was invited back again for dinner and the whole tableau was restaged
for him by his forgetful hostess, word for word.

For his part, Frederick Vanderbilt found FDR's Democratic politics abhorrent, and during
the presidential years, his chauffeur had standing orders that when the master arrived at the
Poughkeepsie depot he was to take a roundabout route through the city to avoid passing the new
post office FDR had ordered built. Just the sight of it could spoil Mr. Vanderbilt's weekend.

Sources: Hassett, pages 124-125, 88-89; confidential source.

212 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

fired him instantly. "It all rather upset Papa," Sara had told Franklin,
"and I am very sorry simply for the reason that Todd is so unusually
clean and respectable, a thoroughly gentleman's servant." He had felt
bad leaving their service this way, Todd had told her, though with Mr.
James now so often ill he "found our work more than he could do 'with
justice to himself.' " Franklin had urged his father not to worry:
"There are plenty of good butlers in the world."

Other things had come to bother Mr. James, things about which
he had never complained before. The village boys, for example, who
"make Hyde Park a disgrace to a Christian community by their baseball
matches on Sunday. Last Sunday morning," he had written to Frank
lin at school, "there were 300 on the grounds, men, women and girls
in wagons and on bicycles from all parts of the county. I am going to
have it stopped."

Increasingly, too, there had been thoughts of his own death. On the
eve of Franklin's seventeenth birthday, Mr. James had written, "Do
you realize that you are approaching manhood and next year, when
you begin your university life, you will be away from the safeguards
of school and will have to withstand many temptations? . . . But I
always feel your character is so well formed and established I have no
fear as to your future career, and I often reflect that your dear mother
will outlive me and will rely upon you to take care of her when I am
gone."

In the same mood, he called his granddaughter, Helen Roosevelt,
into his private, wood-paneled smoking room on her eighteenth birth
day. "I wondered what I had been up to and whether I was going to
get a scolding," she remembered many years later. He unlocked a
drawer in his desk and took from it "a little round leather box, very
worn," and pressed it into her hand. "You're eighteen now," he said.
"These are your grandmother's jewels and they've been put away for
a long time. ... I want you to have them." His eyes filled with tears;
Rebecca Howland Roosevelt had been dead for almost a quarter of a
century. Meanwhile, Sara did all she could to take care of Mr. James,
with Franklin's active help. The fond conspiracy between her and her
son to keep his father alive had drawn them still closer, for all the
physical distance that now separated them. Nearly every letter Frank
lin had written home during his last months at Groton urged that his
father not be allowed to worry, not try to go to the Delaware &
Hudson offices in Manhattan, not overdo. "Private, " Sara had written
to him that spring. "When we go to Campo I am anxious to prevent

Under the Influence of His Mother 213

Papa from using his 3rd floor room, on account of the stairs. . . . You
might suggest in one of your letters a little later that you would like
to have that room." Franklin had complied a week later, saying that
he found his old room insufficiently "cozy" and would welcome a
change.

The new Roosevelt yacht, Half Moon II, arrived at Campobello on
July 16, her deck gleaming, the three-man crew in crisp uniforms with
her name embroidered on their caps and blouses. Mr. James was de
lighted with her. It was his seventy-second birthday. Franklin was
away finishing his two-week stint at the Groton camp, so Sara and his
father celebrated alone together aboard ship. Mr. James's physician had
advised him to carry brandy with him at all times as an emergency
stimulant for his heart, so Sara who normally disapproved of drink
ing anything stronger than wine gave him "a very small pocket flask"
of silver, engraved with his initials.

Franklin returned from camp the next day with his friend and
future roommate, Lathrop Brown, and the four of them went for a
two-day sail up the Bay of Fundy to Saint John on the New Brunswick
coast. It seemed like old times at first, but only at first, for it was soon
evident that Mr. James "was not very well," Sara noted in her diary,
"and I was so afraid he w'd be really ill that I slept not at all." (Both
she and Mr. James must have remembered that Rebecca had suffered
her final heart attack on board another Roosevelt yacht.) The family
got home safely, but never again dared sail together far from shore or
for more than a few hours.

Mr. James was only sporadically well for the rest of the summer.
He spent long drowsy hours in the sun on the veranda looking out
across the bay on which Franklin and his young friends sailed every
afternoon. Sara usually sat with him, ready to tend to his needs, both
waiting eagerly for their son's return each evening with cheering
stories of all he had been doing. He won the golf tournament again that
August, despite the herds of oblivious sheep that constituted such an
unpredictable hazard on the Campobello course. The players, FDR
recalled, "simply had to aim well over their cropping heads, shut their
eyes and hope for the best." There were domino parties and dances and
taffy pulls, and one evening Sara managed to leave her husband's side
long enough to act as hostess for a "young dinner" for Franklin and
seven of his friends.

The Roosevelts left Campobello for Hyde Park in early September,
stopping in Boston for a few days so that Franklin and Lathrop with

214 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

a good deal of supervision from Sara could order carpets, furniture,
and drapes for their four-room suite in Westmorly Court. They all
stayed at the Touraine Hotel, and as they left the city for home, Mr.
James told Sara he had so enjoyed it that "we must go there often and
see Franklin."

They had one more week with him at Springwood before he was
scheduled to begin his freshman year at Harvard. Mr. James rode
around the estate on Bobby a groom had to lift him in and out of the
saddle and pronounced his gentle new horse "perfect, " according to
Sara. Rosy returned from Europe on September 2 1 , just in time to help
celebrate her forty-sixth birthday. "My dear James surprised me with
a cake and candles and sapphire sleeve links," she noted with pleasure
that evening. Three days later, Franklin took her for a long quiet canoe
ride on the river, and on the twenty-fifth he set off for college.

Sara thought this "a great step!" though in many ways it was a
modest one. To a remarkable extent the world to which he was going
was the same as that from which he had only recently emerged. There
was to be sure, little sign of the rigorous austerity so favored by
Endicott Peabody in Franklin's Westmorly suite; he and Lathrop
Brown would live in comfort at Harvard, as suited preparatory school
graduates residing in one of the four exclusive residence halls West
morly, Randolph, Clavery, and Russell that lined Mount Auburn
Street and made up what was called the Gold Coast. (Less prosperous
students lived in shabby, poorly maintained dormitories within Har
vard Yard.) And there were certain self-conscious evidences of world-
liness, of which the rector would have disapproved: beer steins sus
pended from nails framed a doorway and hung here and there on the
walls.

But Franklin and his roommate also did their best to transform their
suite into a Groton shrine. The walls were hung with Groton pennants
and framed team photographs; more school mementos lined the study
tables and mantelpieces. And they lived surrounded by their Groton
classmates, all but two of whom had entered Harvard with them.
Franklin ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day at an all-Groton
table in a private dining hall "great fun and most informal," he told
his parents and in the evenings he and Lathrop sauntered down
Massachusetts Avenue to a tobacco shop and billiard parlor called
Sanford's, where they were sure to find "most of the Groton, St.
M[ark's] & St Paul's & Pomfret fellows."

James Roosevelt sits for his portrait in a Paris photographer's studio in
1861. His eldest son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt barely six but already
known to everyone as "Rosy" stands at his side.

Rebecca Howland Roosevelt (above), James
Roosevelt's first wife, and two portraits of their
son, Rosy: at twelve (right), fitted out for
school in Dresden in 1866, and nine years later
(facing page), ready for Mrs. Astor's fancy
dress ball in the costume in which his mother
thought "he looked so handsome."

Springwood, seen from the south, in 1900; the tiny figure on the veranda is James
Roosevelt reading his newspaper.

Algonac, the home of the Delanos, at Newburgh, New York.

The Delano sisters, as they looked in the autumn of 1882: (standing, left
to right) Laura, Sara, Kassie; (seated) Annie and Dora. Facing them is
their father, Warren Delano II, photographed at Algonac in 1889, five
years after Laura's fiery death; her portrait leans at the right, surrounded
by flowers.

James Roosevelt, widower, in 1879.

Sara Delano Roosevelt in Rome on her honeymoon in 1881.

Warren Delano III and IV. It was the sudden death of this small child
that prevented Sara from naming her son for her father.

Mr. James and Franklin in June 1883.

Franklin at four, with the blond curls his mother always thought had
made him look "very sweet."

Franklin at five, shorn at last, but now persuaded to wear kilts. This
portrait was made in the winter of 1887 in Washington, where Franklin
visited the Oval Office of the White House for the first time.

Master Franklin and Mr. James at Springwood in 1891. Franklin rides
his pony "Debby"; his father sits astride "Doolitde," the last of his stable
of trotters.

Franklin and Fraulein Reinsberg (right), his German governess, on the
frozen lawn of Crumwold, the neighboring Hyde Park estate of Colonel
Archibald Rogers, in March 1891.

Under the Influence of His Mother 215

It was with these young men that Franklin identified at Harvard,
among them that he was determined to succeed.

In effect he was already a sophomore, his final year at Groton
having been the academic equivalent of his freshman year at college.
The elective system pioneered by the university president, Charles W.
Eliot, required only that first-year students take a handful of basic
courses, after which they were free to enroll for pretty much whatever
courses they fancied. Franklin and his Groton classmates had all taken
and passed advanced placement examinations during their sixth-form
year and were therefore allowed to skip the basic curriculum and finish
their Harvard course of studies in three years instead of four.

The Harvard faculty roster was filled with distinguished names.
William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Miinsterberg, and George San-
tayana (then still an instructor) were all in the philosophy department;
George Lyman Kittredge and Charles T. Copeland taught English;
history was in the hands of Albert Bushnell Hart and Edward Chan-
ning. Franklin would get to know few of Harvard's finest teachers, and
was rarely overly concerned with what anyone tried to teach him. He
would miss five weeks of lectures on frontier history by Frederick
Jackson Turner, then visiting from the University of Wisconsin, for
example, in order to take a Caribbean cruise. The appeal of systematic
or abstract thought remained a mystery to Franklin Roosevelt all his
life. He maintained an academic average at Harvard just slightly above
C and seems to have been interested in his courses only to the extent
that they amused him or added to his cluttered store of truly useful
knowledge. There is not one word about their content in all his letters
home from Cambridge. He had found them all dissatisfying, he would
tell his roommate in his final year 'like an electric light that hasn't
any wire. You need the lamp for light, but it's useless if you can't
switch it on." And the stories he later told about his days in Harvard
classrooms mostly had to do with pranks, such as the time he and most
of the rest of his class slipped quietly out the window after attendance
had been taken by a tedious but blessedly myopic lecturer on English
history. 2

2. Franklin did take one course whose title at least promised practical application English
18: The Forms of Public Address, taught by Professor George Pierce Baker. He was required
to write one hypothetical speech every two weeks on an assigned topic. One of Franklin's
arguments has survived. The assignment was to write as the northern parent of a Harvard student
trying to persuade the parents of potential students from the south to send their sons north to
Cambridge as they had before the Civil War. "Is it true, we ask, that the inhabitant of one section
of this great nation cannot enter a large university in another section because that institution
represents hostility to the ideals and bringing up of that man? God forbid!," he wrote, "Is it true

216 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

"It is not so much brilliance as effort that is appreciated here,"
Franklin wrote at Harvard, "determination to accomplish something."
What he hoped to accomplish was to triumph where he felt he had
failed at Groton, in the athletic and social standings that mattered most
to him and to his peers. From the very first he worked tirelessly to win
what he would later call "a large acquaintance," and to remain "always
active." He tried out for football his first week. He had reached his full
height but was still far too slight for the varsity. He did make "The
Missing Links," the lightest of eight scrub teams, however, and was
elected its captain. "It is the only one composed wholly of Freshmen,"
he proudly wrote home on new stationery emblazoned with his inter
laced initials, "and I am the only Freshman Captain." He signed up
along with some seventy rivals as a candidate for the university news
paper, the Crimson, too, reporting that "if I work hard for two years
I may be made an editor. I have to make out notices and go to inter
views so I am very busy." And he joined the Republican Club and
marched, wearing a red cap and gown, with most of the members of
his class in a "grand torch light parade of Harvard & the Mass. Instit.
of Technology . . . into Boston & thro' all the principal streets about
8 miles in all. The crowds to see it were huge all along the route." An
icy rain pelted the marchers all evening, but it was worth it. William
McKinley of Ohio was the party's presidential nominee; his running
mate was Cousin Theodore.

that Harvard, the oldest university of the New World, represents only that narrow faction, yes,
that increasingly narrow faction of Americans who do not and will not make an attempt to meet
the South halfway in their great problem, the Negro? Once more, God forbid!" Northerners,
Franklin continued, must be encouraged to "know and sympathize with our brothers of the South
more and more. . . . You complain that the ignorant black is on the same political footing with
yourselves, and we understand it and ask a remedy." That remedy was education, a "crusade
against ignorance. . . . And this is why, and this only, that Harvard has done honor to perhaps
a half a dozen negroes men all of them who have given their lives for their race. Yes, Harvard
has sought to make a man out of a semi-beast." In that effort, the north needed the south's help.
Only by forgetting the bitter past and getting to know one another could north and south
"understand each other better, love each other more."

One of his instructors thought Franklin's argument cogent and intellectually persuasive but
altogether too bluntly stated and therefore unlikely to "budge firm southern prejudice."

Many years later, FDR told his aide William Hassett that "he withdrew from Baker's class
after a few weeks; thought it didn't have much for him. Remembered that he and the professor
could not agree on the way to deliver Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. FDR slouched to the
rostrum and spoke it in a monotone without gestures. Baker was all for rounded resonant periods
with gestures and all the elocutionary tactics."

But FDR did not withdraw from the course. He was, according to one of his instructors,
notable for his diligence, "always appearing to give close attention and to take notes." At the end
of the year he received a C-plus.

Sources: Rita Halle Kleeman Papers, FDRL; Hassett, page 159; Freidel, The Apprenticeship,
pages 54-55.

Under the Influence of His Mother 217

But it was the crowded social circuit that occupied Franklin most
consistently. He bought himself evening shoes, a derby, and a new
dress suit which "looked like a dream and was much admired/' and he
sent home for his late Uncle Ned's old pipe and a big ceramic tobacco
canister made in the shape of a dog for his desk. There were dances,
teas, and dinners in the homes of family friends in Back Bay and
Beacon Hill. He accepted a classmate's invitation to shoot ducks at his
home near Newburyport. "It is not the pleasure of going with him that
induced me to go," he explained, "but the chance to get some good
duck shooting which I have never had & to see a new place."

After Harvard beat Pennsylvania at football, 17-5, Franklin re
ported, "we all, that is about half the college went to the theatre, 'The
Monks of Malabar,' and regularly 'rough-housed' the play. They had
to lower the curtain half a dozen times and missiles flew all over the
place. After it was over, everyone went to the Hotels, I to the Touraine
with 3 others, & 9/ 10 of Cambridge was 'tight'! Lathrop & I remained
sober as judges but couldn't get a car back till 2 A.M.!!!!!!" After such
evenings, Franklin and his friends slept till noon, then cooked griddle
cakes over a chafing dish in their rooms and augmented them with
broiled lamb chops, brought to them by a servant.

Clearly, Franklin's life as a Harvard man had begun auspiciously.
But one barrier to social success remained stubbornly, maddeningly in
place: Taddy. As at Groton, the humiliating existence of his half
nephew continued to haunt Franklin and torment his parents. Taddy
was no longer at Harvard himself; in fact he had not completed his
freshman year. He had acted just as strangely at college as he had in
school. Franklin had received alarming reports of him from time to
time while at Groton the previous year, and had passed on chaste
versions of them to Sara and Mr. James. Taddy had grown his hair
long, he told them, looked like a tramp, and "scurried away" when
spotted by old schoolmates; he had not gone to classes, had undergone
some brutal hazing. "Very funny," Franklin thought, though "rather
too much." Taddy had refused to visit Groton with his fellow gradu
ates at first Sara had urged Franklin especially to invite him: "make
him feel welcome. It is a chance to do a kindness, my boy" and when
he finally did come had lost first his hat and then his travel money;
Franklin had lent him enough to get back to Cambridge.

But even at that, Franklin had kept some more disquieting news to
himself. At the end of his own freshman year, Taddy had been placed

218 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

on academic probation first for failing to show up for classes, then for
not appearing when summoned to discuss his laxness with the dean.
When he also did not come home to Hyde Park in early June as he
had promised, Sara quietly wrote Franklin to see if he knew whether
it was probation or something else that had kept him away.

Franklin wrote back with uncharacteristic vehemence. He had
"never heard of such assininity," he said, "everyone up here . . . thinks
[Taddy] a fool." Academic probation had nothing to do with his
disappearance, he said. "I think I should tell you that Taddy has been
off to New York several times without letting anyone know of it.
... He may be off on a bat now for ought I know. I think the very
strictest measures sh'd be taken, but of course Papa must not worry
... as after all it is no affair of ours." At the very least, Taddy's
allowance should be halved.

Sara answered that while she hoped for the best, she feared that
Taddy would one day embarrass the family. "I am sorry Taddy has
Papa's name if he is not going to grace it," and she wanted Franklin
to do all he could to disassociate himself from his half nephew. She and
Mr. James had contributed toward a pew in the new Groton chapel.
"By the way," she wrote, "will you be sure to have [it] marked with

yomfull name, initials mean nothing I wish your full name given.

You must see to it. You owe it to your good father and Uncle Frank."

But it had already been too late. Taddy had done more than skip
lectures. Beginning the previous March, he had spent much of his time
in New York and there found congenial company in the Tenderloin,
the city's noxious West Side vice district, where he became known as
a young man who could be counted on to spend and drink a good deal
before stumbling home to a friend's flat in the early hours of the
morning. His favorite stop was the Haymarket Dance Hall on West
Thirtieth Street, a big noisy place with gambling rooms upstairs, and
so infamous that in order to hold on to its license the management had
to fabricate fictitious clubs "The Piano Tuner's Benevolent Euchre
and Whist League," "The Welsh Rabbits" that supposedly rented
out the place each evening for their balls.

Here, sometime that spring, while Franklin was worrying over his
part in the sixth-form play, Taddy fell in love with a Hungarian-born
prostitute named Sadie Messinger. She was short and plump but "ac
counted a beauty of her type," according to one newspaper, with
creamy skin and hazel eyes, and she spoke English with a fetching lisp.
Little more is known about her. Her father was said to live in Brook-

Under the Influence of His Mother 219

lyn; she was variously known as "Dutch Sadie" and "Sadie of the
Tenderloin," but she sometimes called herself "Mrs. Gray," claiming
once to have been married to a Boston dentist of that name who had
abused her. In any case, on June 14, 1900 just a week after Sara had
asked Franklin if he knew of Taddy's whereabouts he and Sadie
had driven up to City Hall in a private brougham, applied for a mar
riage license, and asked to be wed right away. She was at least twenty-
five but claimed to be nineteen; Taddy said he was twenty-one, though
he was two months shy of it.

The clerk issued the license, idly wondering whether the young
man was any relation to Governor Theodore Roosevelt, then sent for
a Tammany alderman who happened to be upstairs to perform the
ceremony. The Roosevelt family knew nothing of any of this. Rosy,
who as usual had gone abroad for the season, had had a letter from his
son saying that he planned to go "cruising" with a Harvard friend,
Polly Wharton, most of the summer.

The bride and groom spent a long honeymoon at various country
hotels, then rented a flat at 124 West Eighty-fourth Street. A furniture
dealer was given $5,000 to furnish the apartment. Taddy hired servants
and a coachman. On August 2 1 he celebrated his twenty-first birthday
and became the master of half of his mother's huge Astor legacy. His
secret seemed safe.

But Rosy returned to Hyde Park later that month and early in
October a notice arrived there from Cambridge attaching Taddy's
furniture. "Do not mention it," Sara wrote Franklin. "Papa and
Brother Rosy feel very ashamed about it." Rosy evidently then decided
to look more closely into the life his son was leading. On October 15
he visited the Eighty-fourth Street apartment, accompanied by two
lawyers. There was an angry confrontation. Taddy had been a minor
when the marriage took place, his father said, and he had not given his
consent; therefore, he would have it annulled. Meanwhile, his son was
to come with him and be sent away until he regained his senses. Taddy
went along meekly.

Two days later, someone perhaps hoping indirectly to embarrass
Theodore Roosevelt, now the vice presidential nominee of his party
tipped off the press. The story was a sensation: BOY MILLIONAIRE
WEDS; ASTOR SCION'S BRIDE WON IN DANCE HALL; "i LOVE JIMMIE AND HE

LOVES ME," WIFE SAYS.

Sadie seemed eager to talk to the reporters who crowded her door.
She told one she had never really married Taddy, adding (perhaps

220 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

accurately) that he was not the only man who called upon her on
Eighty-fourth Street, that in any case she had never been divorced
from the cruel Dr. Gray. In another interview she said she had been
visited by "one of those swell women from Fifth Avenue" who had
claimed to be engaged to Taddie and had gone down on her knees
begging her to give him up. "I told her I didn't care who she was. I
loved Jimmie and he loved me. . . . Say, I didn't have to marry the
whole Roosevelt family, Teddy and all, did I? I'm just as good as she."
To still a third reporter she said she had already offered Taddy a
divorce only to have him implore her to stand by him. If Mr. Roose
velt, Sr., tried to have the marriage annulled, she warned, she would
sue him for alienating the affections of her husband.

The scandal sheet Town Topics delighted in the story. Rosy was
"nearly frantic," it said, and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Astor, had gone
into hiding. "The young man, it has long been known, is 'not all there'
. . . the wonder has been that the father did not exercise better surveil
lance over the boy." One reporter was moved to verse:

The social atmosphere is hot,

As hot as it can be,

And "Jimmie, Junior," has got

Much notoriety;

And at the fame that he has gained

His folks most grievously are pained.

His father's ire and sore distress
Would cause a Jove to wince;
He's uttering words today, I guess,
This journal never prints;
While Mrs. Astor well, I see
The pallor of the social She.

If things have gone to such a pitch

That his relations find

Young James they must now unhitch,

'Twould surely be more kind

To fill with bliss Dutch Sadie's cup

In other words to take her up.

Society is passing slow;

It might refresh us, then,

To hear her views of life, to know

Under the Influence of His Mother 221

Her attitude toward men.

When everything is said and done,

Society is out for fun.

And should morality arise,

As an issue on the side,

And should they raise their saintly eyes,

It cannot be denied

That many social dames there are

Whom, by such judgment, we should bar.

Mr. James was mortified. Nothing remotely like this had ever
happened to anyone in his family, or in Sara's. He first heard the news
on the eighteenth from reporters who cornered him in the Delaware
& Hudson office, and he managed to maintain his dignity under their
questioning. He could not deny the story, he said, "though of course
I have no idea who the woman can be." His grandson was "a good boy
on the whole, though notoriously weak."

He hurried home to Springwood that evening, and there had a
serious heart attack two nights later. Sara knew that he had been
working too hard. A coal strike and a broken leg suffered by the man
normally in charge of the D & H office had required him to spend
several days in a row behind his New York desk. But "the dreadful and
disgraceful business about Taddy was the last straw," she told Frank
lin. "Poor Brother Rosy and dear little Helen are terribly upset, Helen

knows it all and feels disgraced Your father cannot get ... out of

his mind the thought that his grandson has been leading a wicked life
for months. His marrying the creature brings it before the public, but
the sin came first and he has disgraced his good name. Poor Papa
suffered so much in the night for breath that he thought he could not
live. He talked of you, and said 'Tell Franklin to be good and never
be like Taddy.' Then he said, 'I know he is good and will be good.'
He says he never remembers a disgrace coming to his family before,
and it is dreadful to him."

Mr. James "thinks of it when awake and dreams of it when he is
asleep," she reported. "It is too bad. This is entre nous entirely. Poor
Helen, pretty hard on her and not very nice even for you. "

"The disgusting business about Taddy," an angry Franklin wrote
to his mother, "did not come as a very great surprise to me or to anyone
in Cambridge. I have heard the rumor ever since I have been here, but
in the absence of facts the best course has been silence. I do not wonder

222 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

that it has upset Papa, but although the disgrace to the name has been
the worst part of the affair, one can never again consider him a true
Roosevelt. It will be well for him not only to go to parts unknown,
but to stay there and begin life anew."

Taddy was sent away to Florida, where he lived for a time under
an assumed name. The annulment suit never came to court. He and
his Sadie remained married, at least officially, until her death in 1940.
Rosy disowned them both, a somewhat empty gesture in light of his
son's inheritance from the Astors.

Franklin's strange half nephew had made his life at Groton much
more difficult than it might otherwise have been. Now the scandal
threatened to do the same for him at Harvard. But worse than that,
Taddy had done what Franklin's own fantasies must have made him
fear that he might do, had actually brought his father to the edge of
death.

So far as anyone knows, FDR did not ever see or speak with Taddy
again. 3

Mr. James never really recovered his health. Frightened that he
might not survive another harsh northern winter, Sara rented a cottage
at the fashionable southern resort of Aiken, South Carolina, sight
unseen "rather small," she gathered, with "only one parlor" and
room for just four servants. Still, the sun would warm her "beloved

3. Taddy remained an enigma to the end. His wife is said to have joined him in Florida in
1900, and at some later date the couple returned to the north, to Forest Hills, New York, where
they took two rooms above a garage in which he repaired automobiles. They would remain
officially married until 1940, although they evidently did not always live together.

He never touched his legacy, would not answer letters of inquiry from the Astor office,
which simply continued to reinvest the interest it earned in more and more real estate.

Sometime before 1927, a friend told Bamie Roosevelt Cowles that he had met Taddy in
Forest Hills and that he was talking of leaving his entire fortune to the Salvation Army. Intrigued,
she invited him to lunch at Oldgate, her late husband's handsome colonial house in Farmington,
Connecticut. Before he arrived, the butler took the precaution of locking the liquor cabinet just
in case he proved uncontrollable. He needn't have worried. Before they sat down to eat, Bamie
asked if he'd like a glass of sherry. No, he hadn't touched a drop of liquor in twenty years.

What had happened to his wife? She no longer lived with him; his life hadn't been what
she'd hoped.

What did he do for a living? Nothing just at the moment. He'd developed arthritis from
lying underneath cars on the cement floor of his garage and had been told to stop working.

He had no car of his own too expensive, he said but he did like to bicycle, and he pedaled
every summer up along the Hudson to Hyde Park, past his father's Red House and Springwood,
to lay flowers on his mother's grave in the St. James churchyard.

He had made a kind of peace with his sister, Helen, once visiting her in New York and
taking her to a restaurant he especially favored which turned out to be an automat.

Taddy died in 1958 and, true to his word, left $5 million to the Salvation Army.

Source: The account of Taddy's lunch with Bamie was given to me by one of his fellow
diners, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., as we sat at the polished table around which it all took place.

Under the Influence of His Mother 223

invalid" there, and it would get him away from the day-to-day anxie
ties of business and the farm. Franklin was "delighted" with her plan;
it would force his father to have an "absolute rest," insure that he
forgot for a time about the affairs of "the everlasting D & H." His
parents planned to leave for the south in mid-December. Franklin
would join them there for Christmas.

In the meantime, Mr. James as always did his best to seem well, and
Sara exulted in the slightest hint of improvement. He could not be
stopped from going to church one Sunday in late October, because the
bishop of New York was to deliver a sermon and confirm fifteen new
members. "James handled the plate as usual," she noted in her diary,
"but he looked very delicate as he did so."

He had retained his fondness for animals of all kinds, purchasing
a small black Pomeranian named "Tip" whose devotion to him was
instant and slavish, and he continued to take short, slow rides on Bobby
whenever he felt up to it, Sara walking at his side. Nor had he lost his
lifelong love of speed. Rosy had now replaced his motorized tricycle
with a Locomobile. It ran well enough on level ground, but often
stopped halfway up an incline and began to roll backward; whenever
his daughter Helen rode with him and this happened, she had standing
orders to jump down and hold the light automobile in place until Rosy
could get it going forward again. Nonetheless, Mr. James was fas
cinated with it, and when Sara's brother Warren and his wife, Jenny,
came for a visit he insisted on taking his brother-in-law for a noisy,
jolting ride to the village and back. "I can see they think James looks
ill," Sara confided to her diary that evening. "He is doing too much
and still thinks and talks much about Taddy's behaviour."

So did Sara. She demanded to know from Franklin if he knew
whether there had been any truth at all to Taddy's story of summer
cruising: "Is Wharton that sort of boy ... or was he at home? . . . We
know Taddy's cruising was of a very peculiar sort. ... It is difficult
to touch mud and not get soiled," she warned. Franklin must make his
college friends "very slowly " so as to avoid bad company.

Mr. James suffered still another attack in late November. Franklin
was "too distressed" to hear of it and said he would come home at a
moment's notice if necessary. Sara sat up with her husband night after
night, reading aloud when he wished her to and "giving remedies at
regular intervals." Racing up the stairs to bring something to him, she
fell and hurt her knee, and so could no longer "run up and down all
day." A nurse moved in. Franklin came home for a one-day visit and

224 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Rosy came over from next door for lunch. "James is happy to have his
two sons . . . To our surprise, James came down in the lift and sat with
us and then he and Franklin and I sat together in the south parlor all
the afternoon . . . James very delicate and tired-looking in a velvet coat,
but it was sweet just to be together."

The next day, November 27, Sara and the nurse took Mr. James
to New York by train, to their apartment in the Hotel Renaissance at
10 West Forty-third Street so as to be nearer to his doctors. He did
not improve under their care, had now lost five more pounds, could
not sleep. Sara wired for Franklin on the fourth of December. He
arrived early the next morning, Sara wrote, "and tried to give me
courage. . . . James was so glad." For the next three days Franklin ran
errands, sat up with his father, did all he could to comfort his ex
hausted, anxious mother.

On the seventh, Rosy arrived from Hyde Park, and "when he got
there," Sara wrote, "his dear father was quite bright and they made me
go down to dinner. I c'd hardly bear it."

At two-twenty the following morning, with Sara, Franklin, and
Rosy at his bedside, Mr. James died.

They took him home three days later. As requested in his will, eight
of "the men on my place" the young William Plog among them
were waiting as the special train pulled into the small Hyde Park depot
that overlooked the river. Together, they lifted the casket from the
train and carried it to the undertaker's hearse, black and gleaming and
drawn by two black horses with black plumes on their harness. Frank
lin, Sara, and Rosy took their seats in the first of several carriages.
Friends and grieving members of the Roosevelt, Delano, and Howland
families followed along behind as the procession wound its way up the
bluff, through the village to the door of St. James.

There was a brief simple service. Three of Mr. James's favorite
hymns were sung "My Faith Looks Up to Thee," "Hark, Hark, My
Soul," and "Peace, Perfect Peace" and then the coffin was slowly
carried to the receiving vault in the cemetery behind the church. It
would rest there until a permanent place could be prepared for it beside
Rebecca Howland Roosevelt, and the twin Scotch granite monuments
Mr. James had planned twenty-four years before could be built above
them.

"We brought him to Hyde Park and I returned to this house
without him," Sara wrote at Springwood that evening. She was numb.
Everything looked the same; everything was different.

Under the Influence of His Mother 225

Franklin did his best to console his mother, saving his own grief
for sleepless nights in his bedroom, as he had been taught to do. Sara
worried that he would fall ill for want of sleep and tried to "keep him
very quiet."

"The days drag on," she wrote. "We have to bear them." Sara and
Franklin gathered flowers every morning in the Springwood green
house and drove together to the churchyard to place them on "the
sacred place." They shared a desultory Christmas and took a long sad
afternoon walk together on New Year's Day. "I dread his leaving," she
wrote of Franklin that evening. Two days later, he took the train back
to Cambridge.

There were other consolations. Tip stayed close at her side. "He
seems to understand," she said. The Delanos closed ranks. Her
brother Warren came to stay until an attack of typhoid sent him
home; anxiety over his illness added to her sense of despair. Her
brother Fred came, too, and so did Annie Hitch and Kassie and her
two young daughters. The children were "a great pleasure and even
seemed to appreciate my misery . . ." she noted, "tho' I tried not to
show any sign of it." Dora Forbes sailed home from France to be
with her, and they spent long quiet hours together, reading aloud to
one another from Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. "They are all
good to me," Sara wrote.

Scores of condolence letters arrived, and she saved them all. Arthur
Dumper, Franklin's last tutor and now a fledgling clergyman in Cleve
land, wrote that "Christian hope [will] bring your consolation." Dr.
Schott, Mr. James's physician at Nauheim, expressed his formal regret.
A cousin of Mr. James's first wife said she wished she could help in
some way, "but Alas! No one can do that except Franklin, for you have
him to love and care for." Mrs. Archibald Rogers wrote from Crum-
wold that she was "inexpressibly sad to think that we will not see the
kindly face and sympathetic presence of our dear Mr. Roosevelt about
this neighborhood which has known him for so many, many years.
. . . God help you and Franklin!" A slight acquaintance whose small
son had been introduced to Mr. James while he was visiting Groton
during Franklin's siege of scarlet fever recalled how he and her boy
"used to walk and talk together. He was so wonderfully sympathetic
with a boy, full of interest and the warmth of affection . . . even though
he was so much wiser and older. ... I think it never entered his mind
that he was better than other people,"

An old New York servant named Mary Moore arduously penciled
a note as well:

226 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

My Dear Mrs Rosevelt,

I went to the renson [Renaissance] this morning to inqire for mr.
Rosevelt. I was very much shocked to heer of Your Dear husbandes Death
Excep my seincer regret in this our of Triel. ... If I could doo any thing
for you I would bee glad to Doo it.

There were newspaper tributes, too like his forebears, Mr. James
was mourned as a "gentleman of the old school" and some of the
boards of directors upon which he had served sent calligraphed resolu
tions of regret; the one from the Farmer's Loan & Trust Company was
especially beautiful, its borders wound with lilies rendered in gray
wash. Sara was "quite overcome" by the Delaware & Hudson's gift
"a high silver vase 2 ft 4 high with two handles . . . with a great salver
or deep silver tray, 1 ft 10 l / 2 inches across. ... It has all quite upset
me," she told Franklin, "as I can only think of Papa. How little he
thought of the feeling he created in others!"

She read over her old diaries in the evenings, angry at herself now
for having destroyed some of them, and wondering anew at Mr.
James's vigor. "I remember what a delight all the beauty of nature was
to him," she wrote Franklin, "and how he could enjoy it even when
he fell ill. ... In all my journals I read how indefatigable he was and
how it was never too cold or stormy for him to go out to walk, drive
and ride. I was the one who often stayed indoors on account of weather
when you were small."

Her own energy and strength had always more than equaled her
husband's, however, and as the weeks passed, slowly, gradually, life
began for her again. About a month after Mr. James's death she lay
awake, she told her son, "and lived over in my thoughts that night four
weeks ago and thought of the help it was to me when you, my dear dear
boy, came to me and I realized how much I still had to live for, even with

your darling father's spirit flown You need not worry about me for I

am all right." She began to ride Bobby around the estate, just as Mr.
James had done, seeing to it that the ice was properly cut and stored and
arranging sleigh rides for the servants who had been so loyal and solici
tous. "I try to keep busy," she wrote, "but it is hard." She dusted and
aired all of Franklin's birds, ordered a stained-glass window from En
gland to be installed at St. James in memory of her husband. By the be
ginning of May she was helping Plog burn caterpillar nests in the trees
on the farm, noting firmly that "it ought to have been done in April."

A month later, she was able to bring herself to ask the veterinarian
to chloroform Doolittle, the last survivor of the stable of fine trotting

Under the Influence of His Mother 227

horses of which her husband had been so proud. The horse had grown
feeble and stiff-legged and was losing weight, "so that I feel he suffers,"
she told Franklin. "It cost me a good deal of feeling to come to this
decision. He was such a pet of Papa's. ... I hope Bobby may last much
longer, and as he is about 5 l /2 , he ought to give us years of pleasure."
She was again thinking of the future.

All her life, Sara Delano Roosevelt had directed her love and en
ergy into caring for and identifying with a man first her powerful
father, then her loving husband, finally her son. Now she had buried
two of them.

She was just forty-six, heavier than she once had been, but still re
gally handsome, well connected, and wealthy. Springwood was now
hers, along with the rest of her husband's sizable estate (except for trust
funds of $ 1 20,000 meant for each of his sons), and her father had left her
an additional $1,3 00,000. Remarriage might have seemed likely. Two of
Sara's own sisters had been widowed. Kassie had already remarried
when Mr. James died; Dora would marry again within two years. 4 But
Sara is not known ever to have considered life with another man.

4. Both second marriages were in fact somewhat unconventional. Dora and Will Forbes had
been married more than thirty years when he died in 1896; seven years later (and to Sara's
astonishment) Dora married her late husband's youngest brother, Paul Forbes.

Kassie's first husband, Charles Robbins, had died young, leaving her with two children. Her
second husband, Hiram Price Collier, whom she married in 1893, was a divorced man, a former
Unitarian clergyman, and would-be author without funds who had just written his first book,
Mr. Picket Pin and His Friends, an account of life among the Sioux. The Delanos evidently
disapproved of this union, at least at first. No mention whatsoever is made of it in the otherwise
encyclopedic Algonac diary for 1893. Fred Hitch was then the estate's chronicler.

The Colliers lived at Tuxedo Park, where they built themselves a fine house and he worked
away at his writing when he was not engaged in the outdoor sports that were his special
enthusiasm. The editors of Town Topics savaged him at least twice in print as a feckless adven
turer, living off his wife's wealth and oblivious of the scorn of his neighbors. He and his wife,
they said, displayed "joy and excitement over their new home and their even newer social
recognition [with] childlike ingenuousness. They fairly sweat self-content."

These articles angered Sara. "I am so sorry for dear Aunt Kassie," she told Franklin in 1901,
"and considering her family, and bringing up, and beautiful home, it is, to say the least, trying
to have any paper speak of her new house as if she had at last risen to opulence. And why can't
they let Collier alone when he is leading a good life, and they are a happy family?"

Price Collier he dropped the Hiram when he began to write eventually won a considera
ble reputation as an idiosyncratic travel writer with books such as America and tbe Americans,
England and tbe English, and Germany and tbe Germans; and he and his wife spent a good deal
of their rime abroad. All his works were laced with his firm and distinctly conservative political
views. "He stated his beliefs vigorously," an official biographer wrote with great tact. "Some of
his characteristic beliefs were in capital punishment, athletics, war, the Kaiser and the House of
Lords." He collapsed and died instantly of a heart attack while shooting rabbits on a ducal estate
in Denmark in 1913.

Kassie lived on in Tuxedo until her own death, and Sara often visited her there. Both she
and her children found themselves adamantly opposed to every aspect of the New Deal. Despite
this, Kassie and Sara remained close throughout their lives, their shared Delano heritage too
strong ever seriously to be threatened by political quarrels among the children.

Sources: Dictionary of American Biography; Town Topics, May 2, 1901, and March 23, 1905,

228 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

A long empty widowhood stretched ahead of her. She would fill
it with steady devotion to Franklin. His life would give hers meaning,
just as her father's and her husband's had. His successes would be hers.

Even if Franklin had not been genuinely saddened by his father's
death, the rigid strictures of what was then called "deep mourning"
would have curtailed his social life for six full months. His and his
mother's black-bordered letters were now filled with discussions as to
what he could and could not decently do. Might he be an usher at a
friend's wedding in June? The six months would then just be over.
Sara thought he might, and Franklin agreed "I feel as you do that
dear Papa would have liked me to" but when the wedding was
moved back to April he had to decline. If he went to Groton to see
the sixth-form play, he promised "to keep in the background as I don't
want to see many people," and he would accept his friend Tom Beal's
invitation to spend a quiet March weekend at his family's home in
Boston only if no other guests were to be there. "I shan't do it if he
has a single other person in the house." He could go, Sara replied,
adding some words of advice: "I trust, dear boy, that you will take your
evening clothes and all nice things, silver clothes brush, etc., in your
valise to the Beals, as when visiting a lady's house you should be
especially 'au petit soins,' and not get packed in such a hurry [as] to
forget slippers, or anything and black gloves, etc., for going to
church." 5

Mother and son kept as close as they could. Each felt responsible
for the other. Mr. James's will had appointed Sara Franklin's sole
guardian and expressed the wish that he be always "under the influ
ence of his mother." Franklin had been exhorted to care for her after
his father was gone. But neither had needed urging; their lives had
always been intimately intertwined. Franklin visited Springwood sev
eral times that spring, and Sara came to Cambridge long enough to
pronounce herself pleased with his rooms. Presumably the beer steins
had not yet been hung or had been temporarily removed. She was
pleased, too, when he was elected an editor of the Crimson and secre-

5. Sara's patrician sense of humor was returning, too. The Rooseveits' New York butler
Peter MacCarty wrote her a note resigning his post, and she sent it along to Franklin: "I am sorry
to have given you such short notice," it said. "But as I have made a great deal of money in the
stock exchange it is very important for me to look after it, consequently I must forfeit my place."
She thought this hilarious, worthy of reprinting in Punch or the Crimson with a change of name.
Franklin, too, was "much amused," though he also thought MacCarty "a fool not to keep his good
position as he is sure to come to grief some day." He cautioned his mother not to be too hasty
in hiring another butler "as we must have a good one."

Under the Influence of His Mother 229

tary of the freshman glee club, and became stroke on one of the
intramural rowing teams, though she also worried that he was trying
to do too much. She thought it best that he resign his post as secretary
and treasurer of the Campobello Golf Club, for instance: "You know
you told me you would do it the first thing after your return to college.
. . . Now ... do try to go to bed early and do not let others keep you
up. . . . Try to use your strength of mind and systematize your time
a little, especially now with so much more writing." And once a week
she sent him by express from Springwood fresh eggs and cream to help
keep up his strength.

The question of how best to spend their first summer without Mr.
James was a thorny one. Sara thought at first it might be best if they
simply stayed together at home at Hyde Park with perhaps a week or
two at Campobello. Franklin disagreed; the memories at both places
would be too painful. "I don't want to go to Campo, neither do you;
I don't want to stay on the river in August, I don't want you to."
Alfred Pell, their old Campobello friend and neighbor, had died sud
denly in March, leaving a wife and a daughter, Frances, with whom
Franklin had played and studied birds in summers past. Why shouldn't
all four of them tour Europe together? "We will both enjoy seeing new
places & new things and it will take us quite out of ourselves. . . . Read
my reasons thro' two or three times & I know you will agree with me."

She did, and in early July, Franklin, Sara, her maid, and Cousin
Theodore Douglas Robinson, the son of TR's sister Corinne, set sail
for the Continent. They would meet the Pells in Norway.

The Roosevelts spent ten weeks abroad, coming back in late Sep
tember just in time for Franklin to return to college. They explored
the fiords on the cruising yacht Prinzessin Victoria Luisa, going ashore
from time to time to visit a whaling village or Lapp encampment, to
climb a hillside or view a waterfall. Their cabins were vast forty-four
by thirty-six feet the food and service sumptuous. Steaming into the
harbor at Molde, they came upon the German emperor's yacht Hohen-
zolkrn at anchor, gleaming white against the dark green of the sur
rounding hills and encircled by its escorts a cruiser, a naval training
ship, and three torpedo boats. Kaiser Wilhelm II himself came aboard
their yacht for tea, unsmiling and astonishingly forceful, Sara recalled,
despite his withered arm. Later, Franklin, Frances Pell, and Teddy
Robinson with some of the other passengers were invited aboard the
Hohenzollern. Sara and Mrs. Pell watched through field glasses. Frank
lin and Frances made such a tall, handsome couple, Sara remembered,

230 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

that even the Kaiser turned to watch them pass. When Franklin re
turned he brought with him a pencil which he had lifted from the
emperor's desk; it had been authentically dented by the imperial teeth.

Later they visited Dresden, and Sara showed her son where she had
lived and gone to school as a girl. In Zurich they stayed in the same
hotel in which she and Mr. James had stayed on their honeymoon
twenty years before. They spent a week with Aunt Laura Delano at
the Beau Rivage Hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva. Sara was espe
cially proud that Aunt Laura seemed "so very pleased with Franklin." 6
Then they visited Aunt Dora and Franklin's Rowland cousins in Paris.
There they learned on September 7 that President McKinley had been
shot the day before while visiting the Buffalo Exposition; it was "a very
serious wound," Sara noted, but the President was expected to live.

The Roosevelts sailed for home aboard the Teutonic four days later,
and as they passed the Nantucket lightship on the nineteenth, Franklin
noted, they "received news by megaphone: President McKinley died
last Saturday." All New York seemed draped in black when they went
ashore.

"Terrible shock to all," Franklin wrote. But there must have been
excitement, too. Cousin Theodore was now President of the United
States.

Not long after he got back to Harvard, Franklin wrote home asking
his mother for help. He was very busy writing a thesis for History 10
on "The Roosevelts of New Amsterdam," he said, and the Cambridge
libraries seemed to yield little information. Would she please therefore
"copy for me all the extracts in our old Dutch Bible & send them to
me. Also the old brown genealogy which you have, a pamphlet, & any

6. Laura Delano was a tiny woman "a little old lady," one relative recalled many years later,
a in a black dress up to her chin" but still formidable and accustomed to being treated as an
Astor. She and her late husband had been so fond of the magnificent lobby of the Beau Rivage
that they remodeled the foyer of Steen Valetje, their huge home at Barrytown, to resemble it.
Once, when the empress of Austria was coming to the hotel for a brief stay, the manager asked
Mrs. Delano if she would be willing to give up her usual suite for a few days; she indignantly
refused: she had paid for the rooms. The empress had to settle for more modest quarters.

From time to time, small nieces and nephews were sent to stay with her in the frank hope
that they and their parents might be remembered in her will. Eighty-odd years later, one niece
recalled a trip to Rome with her aged aunt. They were to take a ride together in her brougham
one morning, she said, and as they took their seats, "Aunt Laura handed me a small leather bag
filled with coins, which I was to throw in the faces of the beggars. A terrible affront, I thought."
But the little girl hurled them anyway; one did not quarrel with Aunt Laura.

The old woman died in 1901, not long after Sara and Franklin had visited her, leaving behind
a vast fortune.

Source: Interview with Laura Chanler White.

Under the Influence of His Mother 231

other records you have. ... I must have them as soon as possible." She
bundled up all that he had asked for and sent it off.

The thesis survives. "One reason/' Franklin wrote, "perhaps the
chief, of the virility of the Roosevelts is [their] democratic spirit. They
have never felt because they were born in a good position they could
put their hands in their pockets and succeed." At nineteen, Franklin
was an enthusiastic Roosevelt but an amateurish historian. In fact, the
"democratic spirit" of most of his ancestors was hard to discern; they
had been perfectly content to keep their hands firmly in their pockets.
But if he had inaccurately described his forebears, it was his fifth cousin
whom he was really trying to account for. TR's latest triumph pro
vided still more vivid evidence of what a Roosevelt might do in the
greater world.

Mother and son were united in their admiration for the new Presi
dent, and sometimes Sara's enthusiasm outstripped even Franklin's.
When TR intervened in the bitter coal strike the following year, the
Harvard government student gravely wrote home that "in spite of his
success in settling the trouble, I think that the President made a serious
mistake in interfering. . . . His tendency to make the executive power
stronger than the Houses of Congress is bound to be a bad thing,
especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office."
His mother would have none of it. "One cannot help loving and
admiring him the more for it," she said, "when one realizes that he
tried to right the wrong."

"I constantly hear your father's voice saying when he was ill 'Only
tell Franklin to be good, to be a good man,' " she wrote to Franklin
later in his college career. "He often repeated it and never until the
other day in reading Jacob Riis' [biography of Theodore Roosevelt]
did I know that Mr. Theodore [Roosevelt, Senior's] last words to bis
son were 'Be a good man.' Is that not a coincidence?" That kind of
coincidence, with its clear if unstated hint of succession, must have
greatly pleased her son.

His kinship with the President was occasionally an embarrassment
to him. He now had to slough off a good deal of kidding about his
intimacy with "the royal family," and much that he did came under
special public scrutiny simply because he was a Roosevelt. When he
and two friends organized a fund drive that raised $336 for the relief
of the Boer women and children, who they believed were then being
mistreated by the British in South Africa, for instance, he was singled
out by the Boston Globe for special, fulsome praise: "Young Roosevelt

232

BEFORE THE TRUMPET

has many of the qualities that have put his [cousin] at the front. He is
a hard worker, thoroughly democratic."

Such tributes surely delighted Sara 7 Franklin always sent the
clippings home for her to see and save but they embarrassed him,
made him "excessively 'tired/ " he said, and did him no good among
his classmates. Still, in the main, being Theodore Roosevelt's young
cousin stood him in good stead at Harvard. He had been passed over
for the Crimson staff when the first freshmen were picked for it in
February of 1901, but he scored a journalistic coup two months later
when he learned that the then Vice President was staying overnight
at the Boston home of Professor A. Lawrence Lowell. Both Franklin
and Teddy Robinson were enrolled in Lowell's course in constitu
tional government. Hoping to catch at least a glimpse of his cousin,
Franklin called the professor's home, asked for the Vice President, and
was put right through. TR said he'd be delighted to see Franklin and
Teddy, but there was no need for them to come into Boston. The best
time would be the next morning, right after Lowell's nine o'clock class,
which he planned to address on his experiences as governor of New
York; his lecture was being kept a secret to keep the crowds down.
Franklin put down the telephone and raced to the Crimson with the
story. It ran the next morning, and by class time some 2,000 students
and curiosity seekers were milling around the doors of Sanders Thea
ter. Lowell was furious, but the Vice President seemed not to mind,
and when he spotted Franklin among the 500 spectators who had
managed to squeeze inside to hear him, he interrupted his talk to smile
and wave a special greeting.

Perhaps a little embarrassed at how easily he had come by the story
of TR's lecture, FDR later liked to claim responsibility for a second
and far more impressive freshman scoop. President Eliot of Har-

during the siege of Ladysmith, "I entirely

i i_ f t ~"*r- A "* * liLLtc "" iiniuciicea oy meeting on a steamer and
? ST r three rt' some dutch and W breeds. I was only a child of ten but
, h ,v * C I 01 "" 1 , " dutch J men with their Dative and half native families! Then all one
reads f their life m the colonies and in South Africa shows them to be 'boors ' Still I like you

Kr r hT P mi T; n K d t0 lo k into ' hi S* ""ore deeply than your Mummy does "
Franklin had responded then with masterful diplomacy: "I think you misunderstand my

p feeIin S convinced that the B ^ have thSeTf
- Wo ^ und obtedly now thatthe war is actually
^ r civilization

Under the Influence of His Mother 233

vard was known to have strong reservations about Theodore Roose
velt, once having denounced him and his ally Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge as "degenerated sons of Harvard" for their jingoism; and TR
had privately returned the compliment, seeing in Eliot signs of the
flabby sentimentalism which he believed "eats away the great fighting
qualities of our race." In 1900, however, with the presidential election
fast approaching, Eliot had published an article in the Outlook which
seemed more cordial toward the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket than to
William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats.

The Crimson editors understandably wanted to find out for whom
Eliot ultimately planned to vote. Eliot thought this none of his stu
dents' business and refused even to speak to Crimson reporters. FDR,
who later said he had not known of the president's firm policy of
silence, thought the easiest way to discover Eliot's intentions was
simply to ask him. He strolled over to the president's residence one
evening and knocked. Eliot asked him who he was. FDR identified
himself, then blurted out his question: "I came to ask you, Mr. Presi
dent, whether you are going to vote for McKinley or Bryan?"

Eliot was enraged. "Wh-a-a-t?" he shouted.

Then, FDR recalled, "I realized just what the situation was, and
wished the floor might open and let me through to any kind of dark
ness that would hide me. Still, I had come for news, and I stood there
while Dr. Eliot looked me through and through."

" 'What do you want to know for?' he asked finally.

" 'I want to get it for the Crimson, * I said."

Eliot finally barked that he planned to vote Republican.

The story appeared in the Crimson the next morning, and was
picked up all over the country.

FDR told of his brash visit to Eliot's home in vivid detail in an
interview with a reporter for the New York Telegraph in 1913. It was
a good tale, except for the fact that FDR had had absolutely nothing
to do with obtaining Eliot's preference for the paper. The intrepid
freshman reporter had actually been Albert W. De Roode, who was
at the time of FDR's interview with the Telegraph a junior law partner
in FDR's firm. 8

Franklin's authentic coup may have owed more to connections and
serendipity than to enterprise, and the published story ran just eight

8. In 1932, FDR admitted this, claiming at the same time that he had no idea how the story
that he and not De Roode had been responsible ever got started.
Source: Freidel, The Apprenticeship, pages 55-56.

234 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

lines, but it helped get him elected one of the five new Crimson editors
picked at the end of the year. Now he hoped that success and the
family connection upon which it was partially based would help him
achieve what he wanted above all else, an invitation to join Porcellian,
the most exclusive of all the exclusive social clubs that epitomized
social success at Harvard, the club of which his father had been made
an honorary member in 1853 and to which his Cousin Theodore was
still proud to belong. 9 As a "Legacy" a close relative of former mem
bers he knew he would receive especially careful consideration.

The long, convoluted process by which Porcellian members were
chosen began in the autumn of the sophomore year, when the oldest
and largest of all the clubs, the Institute of 1770, chose 100 men to
become members about one fifth of the class. Institute members were
named in groups of ten, the candidates thought most desirable being
grouped in the first lot, those thought socially marginal in the last. A
certain number of these Institute men were then asked to join a more
shadowy fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, known as the "Dickey."
From this still more select group, in turn, came the members of the best
clubs.

Lathrop Brown was chosen for the Institute before his roommate
was. Franklin went home for Christmas in an agony of suspense. Fifty
men had been picked and he was still not among them. The holidays
seemed endless, alleviated only by his mother's Christmas gift a
handsome new ice yacht, Hawk and by an invitation to attend the
ultimate social event of the season, Alice Roosevelt's debut at the
White House. He spent three crowded days in the capital, attending
formal dinners, a reception at the Austrian embassy, the dance itself,
held in the East Room and "most glorious fun," according to Franklin.
"The Washington people weren't in it with the New Yorkers & from
start to finish it was glorious." There was also tea with Cousin Theo
dore, lunch at Cousin Ramie's home on N Street (so often visited by
her brother that it had become known as the "Little White House"),
a second private talk with the President altogether "something al
ways to be remembered."

Back at college in early January, he found that he had finally been
picked for the Institute "the 1st man on the 6th ten." There then

9. In 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II, telling him
of his daughter Alice's engagement to Nicholas Longworth, a Republican congressman from
Ohio, he could think of no higher praise than to point out that his prospective son-in-law also
belonged to Porcellian.

Under the Influence of His Mother 235

began a week of arduous, sometimes humiliating initiation rites known
as ''running for Dickey," These held no terrors for Franklin; though
he was "about to be slaughtered," he told Sara, he was "quite happy."
Everything seemed finally to be going well, and at the end of the week,
a full-fledged member of the Dickey, he pronounced himself "nearly
used up. Wonderful." The invitation from the Porcellian seemed only
weeks away.

The system by which new members were chosen was brutally
simple. The membership sixteen juniors and seniors sat at a table
in their clubhouse, each holding one white and one black ball. The
name of each prospective candidate was read out, and after what one
member recalls as "much discussion," a formal vote was taken, each
man depositing one ball in the wooden ballot box that was passed
among them. A single black ball was all that was needed to exclude a
candidate, the idea being that every current member must be enthusias
tic about every new one: no one considered merely "all right," was
ever to be allowed in. Eight sophomores were unanimously endorsed.

Franklin Roosevelt was rejected. No one now knows what tipped
the scales against him. It may have been the scandal surrounding
Taddy. Perhaps some members had been put off by the same chatty
overconfidence that had alienated many of his classmates at Groton.
Eleanor Roosevelt once suggested that the Porcellian men had found
Franklin too bookish. But whatever went wrong, the secrecy with
which the vote was conducted made the rejection all the more difficult
to bear: even those who voted did not necessarily know which of their
fellow-members had placed a black ball in the box. Franklin felt that
the five members who had been his schoolmates at Groton had some
how failed to back him as they should have, that newer acquaintances
whose friendly allegiance he had worked hard to win might have
proved false. But he could not be sure who they were, could not
contest the snub or explain it, even to himself. He knew only that just
as at Groton he had unaccountably been barred from the exalted
position that his childhood training had taught him should be his
without effort. And, still more searing, he had to live with the knowl
edge that he had been found wanting by the same club that had so
eagerly welcomed the two men he had been taught most to revere:
Theodore Roosevelt and his own father.

The wound never healed. Fifteen years later, returning from
Europe as assistant secretary of the Navy aboard a U.S. battleship and
in the entourage of the President of the United States, he told a relative

236 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

that his failure to make Porcellian had been "the greatest disappoint
ment of my life." (By then his failure had been made still more humi
liating: two of Theodore Roosevelt's own sons, Theodore, Jr. and
Kermit, had been admitted to the club.) Eleanor Roosevelt would later
go so far as to say that the Porcellian rebuff had given her husband u an
inferiority complex," but she also believed that like his similar defeats
at Groton, it had helped him to identify with life's outcasts.

Again, if it did, that identification came later. To be sure, there
continued to be a sober, charitable side to him, more than a hint of
substance beneath the glossy gregarious exterior. He still found time
at Harvard to serve the Groton Missionary Society, teaching occa
sional classes and overseeing games at the St. Andrew's Boys Club in
Boston, and he joined the Harvard Social Service Society. He was
genuine in his wish to do his part to aid the unfortunate, just as his
father and mother had always insisted that he should. But his contacts
with the poor remained tentative, superficial, and on at least one occa
sion, frightening.

Running late for a train to New York, where he planned to spend
a social weekend, he boarded a streetcar for South Station carrying a
heavy suitcase. The streetcar stalled with a broken wheel. With just
four minutes to spare, he jumped down and sprinted for the station,
still several blocks away. A small Italian boy darted out of a side street
in front of him. Both crashed to the ground, the child gasping for air;
Franklin's suitcase had knocked the wind out of him. Franklin helped
him up, but the frightened boy punched at him. An angry woman
stuck her head out of a tenement window and shouted at Franklin in
Italian; she was the child's mother. Afraid he would miss his train and
unable to calm the boy or even to make his apologies understood, he
unfolded a new dollar bill and waved it in front of him. The child
struck it from his hand and, his breath now partially returned, cursed
him for a rich bully. More heads appeared in the windows along the
street. A crowd began to gather, muttering and gesticulating. No one
seemed to speak English. Franklin let the crumpled dollar lie in the
gutter, picked up his suitcase, and tried calmly to walk away. The
crowd followed. He broke into a run. So did they. He ran faster, the
suitcase growing heavier with every stride. He considered throwing
it away, he remembered many years later, "But I had my dress clothes
in it and they seemed at the time too much of a sacrifice to any mob."
His train was pulling out when he finally reached it, clambered aboard,
and collapsed in the last seat of the last car, his pursuers still shouting

Under the Influence of His Mother 237

and shaking their fists from the platform. It took him several minutes
to get enough breath to tell the conductor where he was going. 10

Franklin kept his bitterness over Porcellian largely to himself. His
natural resilience that ability to seem always "bright and happy" that
had characterized him since his Grandfather Delano first described it
in infancy sustained him and helped disguise his unpleasant feelings.
Even Lathrop Brown failed to gauge the depth of his resentment.
"Franklin was not a typical Club man of his generation," he once
wrote. "He had more on his mind than sitting in the Club's front
window, doing nothing and criticizing the passers-by. Thus, his not
'making 7 the Porcellian meant only that he was free of any possible
restraining influences of a lot of delightful people who thought that the
world belonged to them and who did not want to change anything in
it." In any case, Brown concluded, "there was room at Harvard for
other clubs besides Porcellian."

There was, and Franklin was invited to join several of them. His
membership in the Institute of 1770 made him an automatic member
of the Hasty Pudding, and he played minor parts in its annual theatri
cals. He was also elected to Alpha Delta Phi (known as the "Fly"), the
Signet Literary Society and the Memorial Society, devoted to the
history of the university; he was on the "first ten" for this club, he
assured his mother, and "it is a good thing to make." He served both
the Hasty Pudding and the Fly as librarian, buying books for them
while beginning a collection of his own at the same time. The same
energy that he had once devoted to stalking birds was now focused on
discovering treasures in secondhand bookstores. "I went to Bartlett's
to see about some Club books," he once happily confessed to Sara,
"with the sad result that I invested in a few volumes for myself. They
are to be sent home and you can open them. The Smollett is a very
nice old edition, as are the Junius letters and Dryden's Virgil." As
usual, his mother encouraged him in his enthusiasm. "Your Morte
D'Arthur came," she told him. "I spent all last evening [poring] over
it and opened it gingerly, handled it with care and realized that I was
the ... caretaker of a treasure. The burglar alarm is fortunately in

10. Telling this story to Earle Looker, an early and adulatory biographer, FDR claimed to
have learned an important lesson from the experience: "I had bumped into a human situation
and I had failed to play my part in it. I remember I said to myself: The whole trouble was that
I didn't solve the problem. I tried to dodge it by creating a diversion. That doesn't work. F 11 never
try that again!" This homily, Looker concluded, was "the beginning of wisdom" though of
course FDR was all his life a master of the creative uses of diversion.

Source: Looker, pages 35-38.

238 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

perfect order, so if anyone comes to purloin the two volumes, Tip and
I shall go for him." 11

Despite all this cheery bustle, the memory of the Porcellian debacle
continued secretly to fester, and there were those among FDR's politi
cal enemies who would later charge that a desire for personal ven
geance upon the wealthy and exclusive young men who had rejected
him at Harvard lay behind many of the New Deal measures that made
them denounce him as a traitor to his class. This is a simplistic and
remarkably complacent explanation, of course, 12 but the rejection must
surely have reinforced Franklin's growing fascination with politics and
power. First at Groton, now at Harvard, he had learned firsthand that
admission to what his future wife called "the inner clique" was not
automatically conferred, even upon a Roosevelt. He became "ex
tremely ambitious," Tom Beal recalled, wanting above all else to be
come "popular and powerful." He would never again exclusively rely
on position and congeniality to get ahead, would no longer depend
upon others to notice him; instead, he would do his energetic best to
carve out a constituency of his own.

1 1. Franklin did not tell his mother of his long, fruitless search for a copy of a rare volume
he knew his classmates were especially eager to have, Mark Twain's bawdy 1601; or Conversation
as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors.

12. For the record, all but three of the sixteen Porcellian men who turned Franklin down
became bankers, brokers, corporation lawyers or manufacturers; of the eight admitted to the club
from his class, all became bankers or brokers.

FDR himself was fond of tracing the motivations of his political opponents back to youthful
confrontations. He once told Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, for example, that the reason
Trohan's employer, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, so disliked him was that when both were
students at Groton he had stolen McCormick's girl at a dance. (McCormick labeled this "another
of Franklin's shallow lies.") And in 1942 FDR claimed that Arthur A. Ballantine had "hated me
ever since" he defeated Ballantine for the presidency of the Crimson forty years before. Ballantine
became an eminent Republican attorney and served as undersecretary of the Treasury under
Herbert Hoover and (briefly) under FDR. His own short reminiscences of Roosevelt at Harvard
are rueful rather than openly hostile. "As I watched [FDR's] extraordinary career," he wrote,
"there were times when I wished that Franklin Roosevelt had managed to spend more time in
college on some of our excellent instruction in economics and government."

And the President never tired of jokes about the fury his actions stirred among conservative
clubmen. A favorite concerned four millionaires, sitting in the Rittenhouse Club in Philadelphia
and listening to a radio address in which FDR asked, "I wonder what is being said by my rich
friends in their overstuffed armchairs in their well-stocked clubs." "All four men recoiled,"
Roosevelt said, "and one of them, finding his voice, exclaimed, *My God, do you suppose that
blankety blank could have overheard us?' "

Finally, it should be noted that FDR himself once categorically denied his ever having been
disappointed over Porcellian. While himself a student at Harvard, his son James once asked his
father why, if he had himself been so upset at failing to make the club, he urged his sons to join
the Fly. Didn't that imply that the Fly was only second-best? The whole Porcellian story was
"a damned canard," FDR answered though his son is not sure now whether this might not have
been a "rationalization."

Sources: Walter Trohan, Political Animals, page 9; Hassett, pages 119-120; Alfred B. Rollins,
Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Age of Action, page 192; interview with James Roosevelt.

Under the Influence of His Mother 239

The Crimson would provide the vehicle. It was at the center of
things, serving as a sort of unofficial bulletin board for the university.
Students and faculty alike read it faithfully over breakfast, and even
professional newspapermen stationed in Boston scanned its columns
in search of items of interest to the wider world. To be its editor was
to control the flow of all that information; to compose its daily editori
als was to serve as spokesman for the entire Harvard community.

Nothing during his Harvard years meant as much to him as the
newspaper and his role in it. 13 As a sophomore he was already spend
ing six hours a day at its grimy, ink-spattered headquarters on Massa
chusetts Avenue and he was rewarded that spring with election as
secretary. A comic poster printed to announce the election of new
Crimson officers listed him as "Frank, the Fairest of the Roosevelts."
The following autumn he was made one of two assistant managing
editors, in charge of the paper two nights a week, and in January 1903
he beat out his rival to become managing editor. Election as "presi
dent" (editor-in-chief) the next year was virtually automatic. He could
have been graduated at the end of 1903; instead he enrolled in graduate
school, ostensibly in order to win a master of arts in history and
economics, actually so that he might continue as editor-in-chief of the
Crimson.

His colleagues' memories of him at the newspaper were mixed. He
was "a very good companion . . . with a ready laugh and a keen sense
of humor," one remembered, but not outstanding "many of the other
men on the board . . . showed greater ability." W. Russell Bowie, his
managing editor (and successor as president), recalled that he "liked
people . . . and made them instinctively like him. Moreover, in his
geniality there was a kind of frictionless command."

This was especially evident in his relation with the printers, two
paid Scottish professionals named Mac and Ed who were often impa
tient with the students' amateurism and missed deadlines, but who
responded to Franklin's occasional requests to remake the forms to
make room for a late-breaking story "with alacrity and complete ap
probation." Such familiar ease with the paper's employees was never
confused with equality; the same feeling had characterized Mr. James's
relations with the men and women who worked for him; his concern
for their welfare and sympathy with their problems was warm and
genuine but always distanced.

13. In later years, FDR enjoyed telling the reporters assigned to cover him that he under
stood their problems because he, too, had been a newspaperman.

240 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Certainly neither Franklin's classmates nor the members of his staff
were ever confused. "I think it is doubtful whether you would consider
his association with others in college as democratic and widespread,"
Tom Beal gently recalled. Walter E. Sachs, a Crimson editor was more
direct: "He was rather a snob. ... As far as I know, he was not then
interested in the working man that came later. . . . He did not have
the 'common touch' at all in those days seemed ill at ease with people
outside of his group."

Franklin's quarrel with the club system was purely personal he
had simply been denied his rightful place in its midst and he was too
closely allied with the young men of the Gold Coast to wish to chal
lenge their authority. The Harvard Union was opened in 1901, an
enormous, splendidly appointed complex of paneled offices and game
rooms, a library and dining hall, which was intended to serve as an
inclusive, all-campus club, a place where Gold Coast clubmen and their
less exalted classmates from the Yard might find common ground.
Franklin attended the opening ceremonies, which he found "most
impressive," and he was later appointed the Union librarian, but he
spent little time there, and when plans were announced to move the
Crimson offices to a new suite of rooms in its basement, he was against
it. The move would damage the exclusive "esprit de corps" that had
developed in the grimy old quarters, he said, and he feared that the
traditional punch nights might be barred from university property.
This last was especially important to him since he had taken it upon
himself to mix and serve the sticky-sweet punch for these convivial
evenings, thereby overseeing both the flow of drinks and the conversa
tion that went with it, 14

A junior member of the staff suggested to him that the newspaper
abandon its traditional practice of publishing lists of the men who had
made the clubs in the precise order of their election, on the grounds
that such publication was inherently undemocratic. The lists conferred
aristocratic status on certain students, he pointed out, dictating even
the seating arrangements in Boston dining rooms, and they further
humiliated those who had failed to measure up. Though Franklin

14. He continued this practice into the White House. Each evening before dinner, during
what he liked to call "the children's hour," FDR would invite a few associates to join him for
cocktails, which he ceremoniously mixed himself while telling stories. "He seemed to experiment
on each occasion with a different percentage of vermouth, gin and fruit juice," the speech writer
Samuel Rosenman remembered, and the results were often sweet and slapdash like the Crimson
punch, and sometimes distinctly alarming gin and grenadine, for example. Few guests com
plained.

Source: Working with Roosevelt, page 150.

Under the Influence of His Mother 241

himself had been one of these, he refused to consider stopping the
practice; publication of the lists was discontinued the year after he left
Cambridge.

His editorials were entirely conventional. He echoed Endicott Pea-
body's humorless fervor over football, time and again exhorting the
teams to play harder, and urging those on the sidelines to ever-greater
enthusiasm. At one game against Brown, Franklin himself led the
cheers, though he "felt like a D. . . . F. . . . ," he told his mother,
"waiving my arms & legs before several thousand amused spectators!
It is a dirty job," he continued without irony, "one gets chiefly ridicule
but some poor devil has to suffer & one can't refuse." (His mother
answered that while she was glad "you sacrificed yourself and did it,"
she wished him to remember in the future that "in cheering you were
waving your arms, not 'waiving. ' ")

Franklin was especially hard on the freshman team, whose loss to
Andover, 51-0, he called "a wretched showing" for which "the whole
Freshman Class" was to blame. But it was his excoriation of the varsity
team itself now managed by Lathrop Brown that got him briefly
into trouble. In November, Harvard had to come from behind to beat
the fast but far lighter Carlisle Indians, 12-11. The team might con
sider itself satisfied with such narrow victories, Franklin wrote, but
"the undergraduates watching the game were not so well satisfied as
the eleven. They have grown somewhat weary of the slow, listless play
of certain men in the line, who seem to think that their weight is a
sufficient certificate of admission to membership on a university team.
They are weary of a spirit that will not awake till the team is in a
desperate crisis, and goes to sleep again when the crisis is fancied to
be past. They are weary and angry why? because they know there
is no reason why the team should not be powerful, aggressive, and
withal, successful, if it wills to be. ... How long must the University
wait?"

Franklin's tone evidently annoyed a good many of his readers,
although he assured his mother "at least half the college think it was
quite called for. Something of the kind was indeed necessary." Henry
James II, then a third-year law student, wrote in to protest Franklin's
"editorial sarcasms," which bordered on personal attacks; if people
were so grim about amateur athletics, James said, "the fun of the game
will be spoilt for all."

Franklin was not openly repentant. "I am glad to say the effect has
been just what was wanted," he told Sara, "it has stirred up the team

242 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

by making them angry and they are playing all the harder for it." But
a few weeks later he did make a point of paying tribute to those
students about to be awarded academic prizes. A great university, he
said, should strive to be "all things to all men," to reward "mental
training" as well as athletic prowess or social distinction, and "of late
years, the prominence of the unacademic side has perhaps been unduly
emphasized."

He did confront the university administration on two fronts: the
need for wider boardwalks to cross the Yard the narrow planks then
laid across the mud, he said, were "licensed highways to the Stillman
Infirmary" and for better protection against fire in Harvard dormito
ries. All that stood between the university and a major disaster, Frank
lin wrote, were "flimsy wooden staircases" and a single knotted rope
for each suite "of such character that more than one person would find
great difficulty in reaching the ground without a broken neck." Two
weeks later, 602 people were burned alive or crushed to death in the
Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, and one Crimson reader, writing in
to support the editor's call for greater safety, compared the Harvard
corporation's apparent obliviousness to danger to the laxness of the
Chicago authorities who had permitted locked exits and overcrowding
to compound that tragedy. Franklin who had himself so recently
been accused of being too personal in print swiftly disassociated
himself from this letter: "In its sarcasm," he noted loftily, "the commu
nication . . . seems to us in rather bad taste." Nonetheless, he continued
to urge change, and in the spring new safeguards were finally installed.

His Crimson editorials also reveal his continuing impatience with
academic abstraction, his growing interest in practicality and power.
Even his courses in history and economics had come to seem irrele
vant. The picture of America they presented was removed, bloodless,
misleading a perennially tidy place where checks always offset bal
ances, and the precise intentions of the founders of the republic could
clearly be discerned. Franklin already knew that the real world was
infinitely more harsh, intricate, and challenging than that. Even at
Groton and Harvard his defeats had shown him that things were rarely
as simple and straightforward as they seemed, as his mother had said
they were.

In order to succeed in later life, he knew he needed "actual experi
ence." He had joined the Harvard Political Club, which invited outside
lecturers to speak on political issues, but even that was not enough. He
also wanted a "practical idea of the workings of the political system

Under tie Influence of His Mother 243

of the machinery of primary, caucus, convention, election and legisla
ture," and "with such a large city as Boston close at hand," he said,
he saw no good reason why he could not get it: "It would be easy to
send out parties, under the guidance of some experienced man, which
in one day could learn more than through the means of lectures." No
such safaris into Boston's political wilderness were mounted from
Cambridge in Franklin's time.

He had to content himself with the political lessons that might be
learned on the campus itself- In December of 1903, he ran against five
opponents for class marshal. The contest had been rigged in advance;
only the three top men would win, and the clubs had quietly agreed
on their own slate. Franklin was not on it. He used his newspaper to
try to alter the odds. "There is a higher duty than to vote for one's
personal friends," he wrote the day before the vote was to be taken,
"and that is to secure for the whole class, leaders who really deserve
the positions." But he knew he would lose "I don't stand the least
show" of winning, he told his mother that same day and he was right.
He came in fourth.

But he persisted, campaigning hard for still another office a few
days later, chairman of the 1904 class committee. This time he won
easily, capturing 168 out of 253 votes cast. This was the first electoral
victory of his life.

As always, Sara rejoiced in Franklin's triumphs, large and small,
faithfully recording each new club he had joined at Harvard, listing
each victory of his rowing crew, saving every complimentary clipping.
But she was never startled by them. "His father and I always expected
a great deal of Franklin," she once said. "We thought he ought to take
prizes, and we were pleased but not surprised when he did. After all,
he had many advantages that other boys did not have."

His failures were not noted. Like her father, she did her best always
to overlook unpleasantness, to act as if nothing untoward had hap
pened. It was a trait which would reappear in her son as well. "If
something was unpleasant," Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "and he
didn't want to know about it he just ignored it. ... I think he always
thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it would settle itself."
As a result, a certain selective candor always characterized relations
between mother and son.

Sara's life at Springwood was slow, uneventful, lonely. She re
mained relatively young and vigorous, but was expected always to

244 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

appear elderly and sedate. When a widowed friend came to stay with
her, she did not even dare walk home from St. James but had to "do
the 'old lady act,' " she told Franklin, and ride, limiting herself to "a
dignified stroll" on the estate later in the day. She did her best to keep
occupied, overseeing the daily work of the farm, sponsoring a cooking
class for local girls, visiting the Gaulladet Home for aged and infirm
deaf-mutes, where conversation was necessarily limited to hastily pen
ciled notes. An inmate once greeted her with one that read "I notice
you have grown fat," to her great amusement. But her truncated life
was truly whole again only when she could share it with her son.

Franklin worked hard to keep her informed about his busy college
life, but she always wanted to hear more. "Remember," she ended one
letter, "it takes only 10 or 15 minutes to write a nice letter to your
ever-loving Mother." He visited her often at Springwood, Fairhaven,
and New York, and he did what he could from a distance to shoulder
as many of her everyday burdens as she would permit, hiring a new
captain for the Half Moon II and offering counsel when she had trouble
with the servants.

Winter at Springwood had always been the most dispiriting season:
a raw wind blew in off the Hudson; snow blanketed the lawns and
sometimes cut the house off from the road; most of the Roosevelts'
wealthy neighbors moved elsewhere until spring. Sara now found it
"intolerable," and she resolved in the winter of 1902 to move to Boston
and be close to Franklin. This was not a new idea, though widowhood
made it seem more urgent. She and Mr. James had always planned to
winter in Boston while Franklin was at Harvard, and their next-door
Campobello neighbors, the Hartman Kuhns, had once offered to let
them occupy their handsome house at 36 Commonwealth Avenue,
since they themselves planned to spend the cold weather elsewhere.
Now Mrs. Kuhn renewed the invitation, and Sara accepted, moving
there in late March. Dora Forbes, then still a widow, came with her.
(Mrs Kuhn's son, Hamilton, died suddenly not long after the Delano
sisters arrived, and they quickly moved to an apartment at 3 3 3 Com
monwealth Avenue so that their grieving friend could return to her
own home.)

She stayed two months, enjoying the city where many old friends
and family members lived and still more came to see her, attending
concerts and lectures, visiting museums and galleries. But it was the
proximity to Franklin she enjoyed the most. She once explained that
it had been her aim simply "to be on hand" in Boston "should he want

Under the Influence of His Mother 245

me," never to "interfere with his college life," and she no doubt meant
it. But strain was inevitable. First at Groton, then at Harvard, Franklin
had been able to maintain at least a measure of independence from her.
His amiable torrent of letters assuring her he was doing well helped
blunt her constant anxieties about him. Distance allowed him to take
her ceaseless exhortations to dress warmly, down his castor oil, pay his
bills on time, and be courteous to everyone with patient grace. He was
too loving and dutiful actively to oppose her coming; he knew he was
all she had.

At first he seemed delighted that she would be close by. "I am so
anxious for you to get the Kuhn's house," he had written her when
her plans were being shaped. "You must arrange it." But as the time
of her arrival approached, he removed himself from the decision a little:
"I am sorry I can't see to anything about the house, but I shall be
otherwise engaged." Once she and Dora were in place, however, he
came frequently to tea or to dine and sometimes to spend the night.
She gave lunches and teas for his friends. Franklin became her frequent
escort, taking her sleighing or to the theater or for long rides in the
runabout he kept off campus.

We cannot know all that passed between them. Franklin's rejection
by Porcellian took place while Sara was in Boston, which can only
have made that unexpected setback still more humiliating. Then, too,
Sara was accustomed to obedience. Conflicts between her schedule and
his caused tensions that could have no satisfactory resolution. If he
interrupted his frenetic routine to attend to his mother, he could not
avoid resenting it, however unbothered he may have tried to seem. If
he left her on her own too long, her injured air of resignation must
have made him feel guilty.

Sara's first Boston winter lasted barely two months. The following
year she returned for three, renting a second, more spacious flat at 184
Marlborough Street and hoping for the same kind of comforting close
ness with her son. For his twenty-first birthday she gave him a portrait
of herself by Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy. Franklin was "much sur
prised and is delighted," she said. "She was an indulgent mother," a
family friend once wrote, "but would not let her son call his soul his
own." Her emotional discretion was matched only by Franklin's, but
even in her decorous journal for that winter there are scattered hints
that her busy son, now secretary of the Crimson, chafed under such
close and constant maternal attention. In February, she gave a dinner
for visiting relatives to which her son did not come. "Franklin cannot

246 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

leave the Crimson, " she noted And the next month, when Sara and
Franklin's godmother Nelly Blodgett together visited Mrs. Jack Gard
ner and were given a tour of her palace, Fenway Court "no descrip
tion gives an idea of its beauty," Sara said he did not accompany
them, nor did he attend a dinner for some of her friends that evening.
"I was very sorry Franklin did not dine at home," she wrote.

Sometime toward the end of her Boston stay, Franklin tentatively
broached the idea of his taking a month's trip abroad during the
coming summer with his friend and classmate Charles B. Bradley. This
would be his first vacation apart from his mother, and she was clearly
not pleased. He gently persisted, however, and their discussions con
tinued after she returned to Hyde Park in mid-April.

"I really want you to tell me what you would want me to do," he
wrote to her. "I have told you what I feel about it: that it would in all
probability be good for me, and a delightful experience; but that I don't
want to be away from you for four weeks in the summer; also that I
don't want to go unless you could make up your mind not to care at
all. I feel that it would be a very thoroughly selfish proceeding on my
part."

"I am perfectly willing for you to go," she finally told him, "as it
is only for a month and with a nice fellow. I do not think I should feel
the same if it were for longer, or if it were with several fellows. Of
course, dearest Franklin, I shall miss you but I am not silly and I have
no intention of 'tying you to my apron strings.' . . . You are a dear boy
to insist on leaving it entirely to me."

But even as she professed at least limited enthusiasm for his inde
pendence, she was unable to resist undercutting it. His desire to go
abroad without her, she told him, reminded her of the time long before
when he had begged for "freedom" at Springwood and had been
granted a day of it. That had been harmless enough; so would this be.
He had then been eight; he was now twenty-one. Nonetheless, she was
still in charge. She had no doubt that he would be "perfectly happy
and good" while overseas, just as he had been when a small boy. "I
trust you will have a splendid time and be glad to get home as I know
you will."

But when the time came for him to sail, she found the parting
unexpectedly hard. She saw him safely aboard the White Star liner
Celtic; then, as the warning whistle blew, signaling all guests to go
ashore, she burst into tears. "I meant to be very brave," she admitted
to him later, "but after all I played baby at the last. ... It is ... the

Under the Influence of His Mother 247

thought of the ocean between me and my all that rather appalls me."
She left the ship nonetheless, and boarded the Fall River Line steamer
Priscilla for Fairhaven, her first stop on the way to Campobello. There
she "watched till the Celtic came along and passed in front of me and
saw so well that if I only had a strong glass I could have distinguished
you, if you were on deck, I wondered if you were looking at me! I
watched your great steamer going further and further from me with
such a sinking of my heart . . ."

Franklin, too, had been upset. He scrawled his mother a note
immediately, in time for the pilot to take it with him when he was
dropped at Sandy Hook. He had in fact stood out on the deck and
watched the Priscilla as it moved along behind the Celtic. "I saw a
figure in front of the pilot house that I fancied was you as it waved,"
he said. Both Sara and her sister Kassie had given the young travelers
baskets of fruits for the voyage. Aunt Kassie's was delicious, Franklin
told his mother, and he and Charley would enjoy it all the way across
the ocean; but "your basket I am going to eat all alone & give none
of it to C.B.B.!" She was not to worry about him. "I always land on
m y f ee t but wish so much you were with me."

He was more than dutiful while abroad, sending home a detailed
day-by-day journal of the crossing as soon as he landed in England,
followed by a series of breathless accounts of nearly everything he did
ashore. But his delight in freedom was impossible to mask.

The ocean voyage was blissful "delightful bath enormous
breakfast usual routine of gourmandising . . . exciting games of
shuffleboard, quoits & push golf." And lest his mother think he was
being too frivolous, he said he had also "accomplished a good deal on
this trip," having read a lot, worked over his plans for Crimson editori
als for the coming year, and held "interesting talks with Arthur Gor
don [a new shipboard acquaintance from Savannah, Georgia] on
negro, political, educational & other topics."

Charley Bradley had fallen ill with what the ship's doctor diag
nosed as malaria aboard the Celtic, and he was urged to go to Scotland
for a week to recuperate. Franklin was truly on his own in London
at first. He was not even momentarily concerned. He got himself a nice
room, took a nap, then "had a bath & dined at Claridge's. Most excel
lent meal with a pint of burgundy and a good 'segar.* " He ordered
clothes on Savile Row: "1 dress suit, 1 dinner-coat suit, 1 winter suit,
two summer suits & 1 frock coat & trousers" at one shop; riding
breeches at another; riding boots and "patent leather button shoes" at

248 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

a third. He called upon old family friends. Charley returned looking
fit from Scotland. Two other Harvard friends materialized, Ned Bell
and George Williamson, and "we had a most heavenly 21st birthday
of Ned's at the Cafe Royal just the four of us [with] goldfish on the
table music, etc. all in a perfect little private dining room."

And he spent nearly a week at Easton Hall near Grantham in
Lincolnshire, the seat of his parents' old friend Sir Hugh Arthur
Henry, Lord Cholmeley. There he savored the sort of country life his
father and Rosy had worked so hard to recreate at Hyde Park. It was
"a Dream of Nirvana," he told his mother, "almost too good to be
true," and "as the situation [of the house] much resembles ours, I am
taking notes and measurements of everything." He played billiards
with Sir Hugh and sipped port "of about A.D. 1800 that made me
almost weep for joy," and he played tennis and bridge with his host's
three daughters, all of whom were roughly his age and had been his
playmates during a much earlier visit to the manor. He reported to his
mother how they had changed: "May is rather better but it is not saying
a great deal, though she is very nice. Winnie is I think the nicest &
quite stately & Aline is really quite pretty & less large than the others."

Aline took him fishing for trout on a private stream that wound
through the grounds and landed four fish for him: "It seemed quite
wonderful to be getting excellent sport within a couple of hundred feet
of the house and what a house!" She and her father also drove with
him to Belvoir Castle, the still more grandiose home of the Dukes of
Rutland, and after touring the "entire 'seeable' part of the house" he
"met the Old Duke on horseback in a high hat, accompanied by his
chaplain. The Duke is 87 or so & very old in looks but it is wonderful
that he can ride just as my Great Grandfather R. did."

And with Aline and Sir Hugh again he attended a garden party at
a third country house, where he reported a considerable social tri
umph. "As I knew the uncivilized English custom of never introduc
ing people I had about three fits when I arrived and got separated from
Aline & her Father but I walked up to the best looking dame in the
bunch & said 'Howdy?' Things at once went like oil & I was soon
having flirtations with three of the Nobility at the same time. I had a
walk with the hostess' niece over the entire house which was really
perfect in every way I mean the house although the walk wasn't
bad I will have to wait to tell you about it in person again I mean
the house. Then I inspected the garden with another 'chawmer' &
ended up by jollying the hostess herself all by her lonesome for ten

Under tbe Influence of His Mother 249

minutes while a uniformed Lord stood by and never got in anything
except an occasional *aw' or an 'I sy/ "

This wisecracking teasing tone, with its apparently carefree talk of
"flirtations," was characteristic of the way Franklin reported to his
mother on all his friendships with young women. Everything was
casual, all in fun, an amusing game and one at which he claimed to
be an inept player. In later years, the only story she remembered his
having told her about his skills as a suitor was that he had once taken
a girl for a ride on a dog cart and lost control of the horse; the girl had
fainted twice from fright before he could get it to stop.

She was not to worry. He was still devoted only to her, and his
evidently encyclopedic chronicle of all that he was doing was meant
to assure her that he harbored no secrets that might threaten the
single-mindedness of that devotion. But in fact, he was telling her only
what he knew she wanted to hear.

He kept a sporadic Line-A-Day diary during his college years,
never detailed and with long blank stretches between clumps of faith
ful entries. It is an imperfect record, but includes the only hint we have
of the parts of his life he determinedly kept from Sara. In it, for
example, he recorded having gone fishing a second time with Aline
Cholmeley at Easton Hall, further downstream this time and perhaps
out of sight of the house. "Not much luck," he noted in his diary, "for
did not attend strictly to fishing." The next morning he left for Lon
don to rejoin Charley Bradley and move on to the Continent, but not
before having a long morning "walk with Aline." Neither the reason
for failing to catch more trout nor the next day's farewell stroll was
reported to Campobello.

This pattern of concealing his genuine feelings while seeming
faithfully to be revealing all had already been firmly established at
Groton. The first letter in which he even hinted at an interest in the
opposite sex was written home from there at age sixteen on December
4, 1898. It set the tone for all that followed:

"I have not yet had an answer from Laura [Delano, a cousin] about
the Orange dance, but I suppose she can do it. I wish you would think
up some decent partner for me for the N. Y. dance, to which I suppose
I will be invited, so that I can get somebody early, and not get palmed
off on some ice-cart like the Hoyt girl!! Who do you think it would
be nice to have at Hyde Park with the crowd? You had better send me
a list."

250 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Sara complied two days later: "About the dancing class, I send a
short list of girls either one of whom you may be pleased to dance with,
and you ought to write at once

Mary Newbold

May Soley

Muriel [Delano Robbins]

Helen [Roosevelt]

As you know very few girls you ought to make haste."

Of the girls his mother thought suitable, two were cousins; Helen
Roosevelt was his half niece; Mary Newbold was his next-door neigh
bor and childhood playmate.

It was true, of course, that Franklin knew u very few girls" at
sixteen; he had not even known many boys until he entered Groton.
But throughout his final two years at school his mother showed little
inclination to widen his circle of acquaintances. She accepted or re
jected all invitations on his behalf, drew up the guest lists for his
infrequent house parties. He left everything to her: "Don't you think
we had better ask up one or two girls on the 2nd? ... I don't know
any so trust you entirely"; "Please let me know if I am to accept the
Soley invite"; "More shindies to attend to! The enclosed [invitation]
came last night and what is to be done about it? ... I wish you could
either decline or accept it as you think best." And he referred in
especially dismissive terms to those few girls whose names his mother
had not provided; they were all "ice-carts" or "pills" or "elephantine."
From the first, he seems to have known that any sign of romantic
interest on his part would be seen by Sara as a betrayal of their exclu
sive devotion to one another.

Franklin's air of weary indifference as to which girls he danced or
dined with and his willingness to have his mother make all the arrange
ments may have been unfeigned at first. Like his physical and social
development, his sexual growth was probably slower than that of most
boys. That fact may have formed part of the difficulty he encountered
among his peers at Groton. Since he could not at first genuinely share
in their adolescent obsession with the girls they glimpsed only during
their brief holidays from boarding school, he was forced to simulate it,
thereby perhaps adding further to his reputation for "insincerity."

He did not remain indifferent for long, however, as his Harvard
diary makes clear, although the tone of his letters home remained the
same. In June of 1901, after his six months of deep mourning had

Under the Influence of His Mother 251

ended, Sara invited Franklin to bring two classmates home for a quiet
country weekend. Franklin asked whether she might possibly also ask
three girls to come as well: Alice Draper, perhaps she was a sister of
a Groton classmate and the daughter of Sara's friend Mrs. William
Draper, whose father had founded the New York Sun and Cousin
Muriel Robbins and a third girl of his mother's choosing. She was not
sure she thought even this was wise, Sara answered. Alice was still in
mourning for a relative, and in any case "you will have a very good
time, girls or no girls . . . Edmund [Rogers] has boys alone and prefers
it and I daresay you boys will also." Franklin was then nineteen.

As late as October of the following year, he was still writing home
to ask, "What do you think of my taking M.D.R. [Muriel Delano
Robbins], Helen [Roosevelt] & Mary Newbold to see the Harvard-
West Point game at West Point Saturday afternoon? . . . If you approve
make arrangements as to trains."

The list of girls who bore Sara's imprimatur grew a little longer
with the years longer but no broader until it also included Frances
Pell, Jean Reid (the daughter of Mr. James's old friend Whitelaw Reid,
editor of the New York Tribune), and two more cousins Alice Roose
velt, the President's daughter, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the daughter of
Franklin's late godfather, Elliott Roosevelt, a tall shy girl for whom
Sara felt rather sorry.

Over the years, several members of the Oyster Bay branch of the
Roosevelt family were asked what sort of suitor Franklin had been in
his Harvard days. Corinne Robinson Alsop, Cousin Theodore's niece,
recalled that she and her friends had privately called him "the feather
duster" and "the handkerchief box young man" because he so resem
bled the slender, prettified swains that then adorned presentation boxes
of ladies' handkerchiefs; he was altogether too good-looking, too
chatty, too eager to please. Alice Roosevelt was more brutal. "He was
the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance but not the dinner,"
she said, "a good little mother's boy whose friends were dull, who
belonged to the minor clubs and who was never at the really gay
parties."

Their memories may have been colored by time and envy. "We
used to say 'poor Franklin,' " Alice Roosevelt once admitted. "The
joke was on us." When his engagement was announced, at least one
young Boston woman is known to have taken to her bed for several
days out of sorrow and disappointment, and Franklin's diary, spotty
as it is, shows that he did not limit his attentions to those girls on his

252 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

mother's lists. It also offers vivid proof of his highly developed ability
to hide his feelings even from those who thought themselves closest to
him. Lathrop Brown, who remained his roommate throughout his
Harvard career, once wrote with apparent confidence that until Frank
lin became engaged, he "had had no serious affair with any girl, which
was remarkable in view of his exuberance."

It would indeed have been remarkable had it been true. There were
suggestions that he had been interested for a time in a Boston girl
named Dorothy Quincy. Her name appears often in his diary though
never in his letters home as his guest at football games and suppers
and theater parties. On December 12, 1902, for example, he escorted
her first to dinner and then to a dance where "everything was glorious.
Got back at 6 A.M. Didn't go to bed." Dorothy Quincy had been lovely,
Brown remembered many years later, but Franklin had never been
serious about her, "saw her no more than half a dozen girls who went
to the same dances."

FDR's sons Elliott and James have both written that during his
college years their father courted Frances Dana, granddaughter of both
Charles Henry Dana and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She, too,
was lovely, but, according to the story, her Roman Catholicism made
Sara discourage even the thought of marriage. If this tale is true,
however, the romance must have been relatively brief, for Frances
Dana's name appears nowhere in his diary.

That of Alice Sohier does, frequently. She was the youngest of two
daughters of a fine old North Shore family. Her mother was an Alden,
a member of a New England clan still older than the Delanos, and her
father was Colonel William D. Sohier, former Republican state legisla
tor and commissioner of roads, an enthusiastic yachtsman with a town-
house in Boston, an octagonal summer house near Manchester, New
Hampshire, another summer place at Northeast Harbor, Maine, and
an estate in Beverly, just up the shore from the vacation home of
Franklin's friend and classmate, Tom Beal.

Alice Sohier was not yet sixteen when Franklin first met her during
his freshman year. The story in the Sohier family has it that one day
early that autumn, Alice, her older sister, Eleanor, and their mother
returned together to their Boston home from a shopping trip to find
Franklin Roosevelt asleep on the sitting-room sofa. He and two other
freshmen one of whom knew the Sohiers well had sought sanctu
ary there to avoid the traditional hazing from roving bands of
sophomores.

Under the Influence of His Mother 253

The girl Franklin saw when he awoke was tall, slender, delicate and
astonishingly beautiful "of all the debutantes [of her] year/' FDR
wrote many years later, u she was the loveliest." He soon began to call
at the Sohier home. Mr. and Mrs. Sohier liked him. So did Alice,
perhaps initially flattered by the eager attentions of a Harvard man
nearly three years older than herself. He was handsome, high-spirited,
well connected and bursting with plans. He was considering a career
in politics, he once confided to the family; in fact, he thought he might
one day be President. "Who else thinks so?" an older cousin asked, and
all the Sohiers laughed.

Franklin did not start to keep his Line-A-Day diary until January,
1901, just a few weeks after his father's death, and there are under
standably few entries in it during the quiet winter and spring of formal
mourning that followed. But he stayed with the Sohiers at their Man
chester home in June, his first real social engagement after his six-
month period of mourning had ended. Again, there are long stretches
of blank pages in his journal for the rest of 1901, so that it is impossible
to know how often he and Alice were together. But by the beginning
of the following year they were seeing one another nearly every week
end. The entries tumble along: "To see Alice Sohier"; "dance with
Alice Sohier"; "A.S. for supper"; "To Sohiers in evening."

At some point their friendship developed into something more
serious. Franklin was sometimes more ardent than Alice liked. "In a
day and age when well brought-up young men were expected to keep
their hands off the persons of young ladies from respectable families,"
she confided to a relative half a century later, "Franklin had to be
slapped hard. " At least once, she recalled, he had ridden back to
Boston from Beverly on the train with the bright red mark of her hand
across his cheek. But she continued to enjoy his company and some
time during the spring of 1902 they evidently at least discussed mar
riage. Franklin was then just twenty, Alice only seventeen, but he
already had firm views about the sort of family he wanted. As one who
had sometimes felt isolated as an only child, he told Alice, he hoped
to have a lot of children at least six.

In early July, after school had ended for the summer, Franklin set
out from Boston aboard the Half-Moon on a two-week cruise to Cam-
pobello. Two classmates accompanied him, Lathrop Brown and Amon
Hollingsworth. Their first stop was Beverly. They anchored in front
of the Beal home on the seventh. The Sohiers brought Alice over to
dinner, and the next day the young people played tennis before Frank-

254 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

lin took them for "a good long sail" to Marblehead and back. Alice
shared his love for the sea; she had been taught to sail by the yachtsman
Cornelius Vanderbilt III. That evening Franklin was the Sohiers'
dinner guest, and afterward he had a serious talk with Alice. Later,
jotting down his usual skeletal account of his day before going to bed,
he added a line in a private code: "AND SPEND EVENING ON LAWN. ALICE
CONFIDES IN HER DR." Whatever Alice said to him as they sat outside
that warm evening on the Beverly shore was startling enough for
Franklin to want to conceal it from anyone who might happen to come
upon his diary, so unnerving that the next day he felt compelled to add
a second coded message: "WORRIED OVER ALICE ALL NIGHT."

No one will ever know precisely what Alice had told him, but the
evidence at least suggests that it had to do with her own health and the
likelihood of their marriage. She had been somewhat frail since birth,
subject to a whole series of childhood ailments which doctors had been
powerless to halt. "In those days," she remembered much later, "all
they could do was give you either whiskey or brandy and hope for the
best." Her internal organs were all abnormally small for her frame, or
so her physician finally told her family, and the notion of bearing
Franklin several children had alarmed her. It seems likely that she had
finally confessed her worries to her doctor, and he had confirmed her
fears: giving birth would be risky. (Many years later, Alice would tell
a confidante that she had finally decided not to marry Franklin Roose
velt because "I did not wish to be a cow.") 15

Franklin sailed north the next morning, but he may have continued
to see her without his mother's knowledge: twice, he and Tom Beal
undertook cruises south from Campobello, stopping in the vicinity of
Northeast Harbor, where Alice spent summers with her family.

That winter, Alice's older sister, Eleanor, was to make her debut.
She was a lovely girl, too, but not so dramatically beautiful as her sister,
and their father decided that Alice should therefore be sent on a Euro
pean tour during the Boston season so as not to outshine Eleanor. On
October 7, Franklin saw her off aboard the Commonwealth, the Fall
River boat that took her from Boston to New York on the first leg of
her voyage. Alice was presented at the court of St. James's while she
was abroad, traveled on the continent, and saw the pyramids of Egypt

15. Another coded message in Franklin's diary remains opaque. On February 14, 1903, he
noted that ''COMMONWEALTH SAILS." The Commonwealth was a packet that sailed to New York,
connecting with ships bound for Europe. Who was on it this time and why Franklin felt called
upon to keep it secret is unknown.

Under the Influence of His Mother 255

before returning home to make her own debut. By then she had
attracted a great many other suitors, and Franklin himself had secretly
become engaged. But they evidently remained friends, for he did find
time to serve as an usher at her coming-out dance at Beverly in January
of 1904.

"Once upon a time when I was in Cambridge," FDR wrote in
1928, "I had serious thoughts of marrying a Boston girl and settling
down in the Back Bay to spend the rest of my days. Such was the
influence of four years of that . . . [conservative Harvard] kind of

association By the Grace of God I took a trip at that time, meeting

numbers of real Americans, i.e. those from the west and south. I was
saved, but it was an awfully narrow escape." He was half joking, of
course, but it is still curious that he should have so altered what really
happened. For it was Alice Sohier, not he, who took the trip that seems
to have marked the end of their romance; she, not he, who backed away
from marriage. 16

As the summer of 1903 dragged on, Franklin's absence overseas
continued to haunt Sara at Campobello. Without him, the island
seemed populated by ghosts. "Not a day passes that we are not think
ing of the great changes, my dear one, Mr. Pell and Hamilton Kuhn,
all gone!" Even sailing she now found "mere drifting." Franklin's
letters provided some solace: "So dear of him to write so constantly
and fully of all he does!" Six postcards arrived from him in a single
day, mountain views mailed as he and Charley Bradley meandered
through the Swiss Alps before starting home.

16. Characteristically, Franklin avoided mentioning Alice Sohier to his mother as long as
their romance continued. But once it had ended and he and Alice were merely friends again, he
wrote of her freely. In October of 1903 he told his mother that Alice had suffered a severe bout
with appendicitis and very nearly died, and in March of the following year he reported that she
had been immobilized by some sort of hip ailment that baffled her doctors. "Poor Alice Sohier,"
Sara wrote when told of the appendicitis attack. "She certainly gets more than her share of
illness."

Alice married Herbert Bramwell Shaw, an insurance executive, in 1910. They had just two
children, five years apart, and were divorced in 1925. She remained a Republican all her life and
deplored the New Deal with special vehemence, professing not to be surprised that FDR was
"so careless with the country's money" since he had always overspent his allowance when she
had known him. According to the granddaughter who became her confidante in her last years,
she was always glad she had never become "the President's lady." She died in 1972 at eighty-six,
having made sure that all her letters from Franklin Roosevelt were burned.

She and Eleanor Roosevelt met just once, at a Harvard- Yale game some time after the
Roosevelts' marriage. Sara introduced them to one another, explaining that Alice had once been
a good friend of Franklin's. "Yes," Eleanor said to her mother-in-law as she shook hands with
Alice, "I have heard all about her."

Sources: Interviews with Emily and Bramwell Shaw, Alice Sohier's granddaughter and son.

256 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

He set sail from Liverpool on August 19. Sara could not help
worrying that "the tremendous North West wind we have had all
night" would slow his progress, and she was distressed, too, that she
would not be on hand to greet him in New York. "It is so lovely to
see a home face on the dock/' she told him. "I never forget how I felt
the first time I returned with you and Papa and did not see my father
on the dock."

Franklin returned to her on August 26. "A perfect day," she wrote,

"... such happiness to be together again Now that Franklin is back

the Island is changed to me."

Mother and son returned to Hyde Park together. Franklin had his
tonsils removed before going back to Harvard, bearing it "with his
usual stoicism and cheerfulness," she noted. And, "Later I took him
for a drive & he was able to enjoy eating ice cream." They discussed
his future. She had initially hoped that he would enter Harvard Law
School, as his father had before him; it was the finest possible prepara
tion for the sort of life Mr. James had led, and Rosy feared that if
Franklin did not begin his law studies now he might lose interest in
the profession altogether. But the Crimson came first for Franklin;
nothing was going to interfere with his running it, and he did not think
serious study of the law would be possible with all his "outside inter
ests." And so when he got back to Cambridge and after "a Great Fight
in my mind," he enrolled for graduate courses in history and political
economy, though "I do not in the least expect to get a degree." Sara
acquiesced.

He came home for a house party in October and again to cast his
first vote in November. Sara proudly drove with him to the town hall,
where, since this was an off-year election in which the fortunes of
Cousin Theodore were not affected, he voted Democratic. "Hooray
for the Dimocrats of Hoide Park!" he crowed when told of their local
triumph a few days later.

Whenever Franklin left her, Sara missed him "dreadfully," but his
absence that November was made still more difficult when the blocks
of granite she had ordered for the tomb Mr. James had designed for
himself and his first wife finally arrived from Scotland. She drove up
to the churchyard and watched from her carriage with Rosy while her
husband's casket was laid to rest at last and workmen began installing
the stone. "I stayed at St. James till the work was finished," she wrote.
"Then came home and did not go out again. It brings so vividly to

Under the Influence of His Mother 257

mind the sad earthly part of it." Only the final carving and polishing
remained.

There were other sad reminders of death and of the old days at
Springwood that autumn. Miss Alice Clay, the "perfect lady" from
England whom Mr. James had imported to tutor his son in 1893, had
stayed on to work for another family after Franklin outgrew her. She
had now fallen ill and been hospitalized for what the doctors called
"anemia and neurasthenia." Sara took her home to care for. She would
remain for several months, wasting away despite the hours Sara spent
at her bedside and the doctors and trained nurses she arranged to have
on hand.

Thoughts of Franklin and the future kept her spirits up. She was
determined that this would be the last year they would be so far apart.
The next autumn she planned for him to be in New York, not Cam
bridge, attending Columbia Law School, which, she assured him,
"now stands very high." There, she could personally help shape his
career "I still have a few friends of your dear father's who could take
an interest" and Rosy could see that he got "to be known among the
best men." And it would bring him close to Springwood: "I merely
wish you would think seriously of it," she told him, "and to realize how
much it will be for you and for me, for you to be near your own home,
and not too much out of reach."

Meanwhile, she looked forward eagerly to Thanksgiving, which
she and Franklin were to spend together at the Delano homestead at
Fairhaven. There, with him at her side and surrounded by her brothers
and sisters and their families, her life would seem complete again.

She had no way of knowing that the little diary that Franklin kept
in his luggage now contained another coded secret that threatened to
alter the unique intimacy between her and her son forever.

CHAPTER

7

E IS AN ANGEL

After the silence of Springwood without Franklin, the cheerful bustle
of the traditional Delano Thanksgiving at Fairhaven must have seemed
doubly comforting to Sara. She had come up from New York aboard
the train with Annie and Fred Hitch, and with Warren and his wife,
Jennie, who managed the Homestead for the family, and their four
girls. Franklin had boarded the train en route. Fred and his wife, Tilly,
came all the way from Chicago. Only Dora Forbes and the Colliers
were absent, but Kassie's son, Warren Robbins, made it to the gather
ing from Groton.

Thanksgiving morning was cold and clear. The sun shone brightly
on the harbor and on the white clapboarded houses as the Delanos
trooped together once again to church; and it warmed them afterward
when they all stopped for a moment to lay armfuls of flowers at the
family tomb in Riverside Cemetery.

They did their best to recreate old times at dinner, prepared by the
elderly retainers who looked after the house throughout the year and
presided over by Warren, his neatly trimmed beard silver now as he
carved the turkey with as much of his father's old flourish as he could
muster. Then he rose to propose the annual toast:

Here's to the past!

And to those who have peopled it!

May we e'er make the best of it!

E is an Angel 259

Here's to the future!

To our hopes! Our ambitions!

To our Sons; and our Daughters!

And may our traditions

In their hearts ever dwell;

And continue in those of their children as well!"

After dinner, the Delanos gathered around the piano in the parlor
as they had so many times before and sang old favorites, Sara's confi
dent soprano and Franklin's rich tenor clearly audible above the rest.

Sometime later that day, Franklin took his mother aside perhaps
outside in the walled garden, fragrant with the tang of apples that had
fallen from the old trees beneath which Sara had played in her grandfa
ther's time and told her his astonishing secret. It fell upon her like
the blows of a hammer.

He had fallen in love with his cousin Eleanor Roosevelt.

He had asked her to marry him.

She had said yes.

No one now can know all they said to one another that evening.
Sara noted in her journal only that Franklin had given her "quite a
startling announcement." She and her son were both reticent, both
strong-willed; neither ever wished to wound the other. Perhaps at first
she thought or hoped that this sudden infatuation was just another
evidence of her son's boyish impetuousness. Like his eight-year-old's
wish for "freedom," like his more recent desire to travel abroad on his
own, it was something he was sure to get over. In any case, at twenty-
one, Franklin was far too young to marry. Her own father had been
thirty-three when he married already "a man who had made a name
and a place for himself," she later remembered having told Franklin,
one "who [had] something to offer a woman." And Franklin's own
father had been fifty-six when she had married him. Cousin Eleanor
was a lovely girl, but she was only nineteen. Sara exacted the promise
that the engagement would remain a secret for at least a year. That
would give Franklin and Eleanor plenty of time to think things over.
In the meantime, no one must be told. Mother and son returned to the
family as if nothing had happened.

But whether or not Sara expressed it openly at Fairhaven, the
prospect of marriage for her son meant that she was to be left alone
again, this time for good. Franklin and Eleanor had often been together
over the past year, but there had been no hint of a romance; at least

260 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

none that she had detected. She had thought Franklin was telling her
all that he was doing, but clearly he had told her nothing that truly
mattered. She had been patronized.

On December first, Franklin took Eleanor to see his mother at the
Roosevelt apartment in the Renaissance Hotel, and Sara had what she
described only as "a long talk with the dear child." Both Franklin and
Eleanor sensed her fear and resentment, and sought as best they could
to reassure her.

Franklin wrote to her from his office at the Crimson as soon as he
got back to Cambridge.

"Dearest Mama I know what pain I must have caused you and
you know I wouldn't do it if I really could have helped it mais tu sais,
me voila! That's all that could be said I know my mind, have known
it for a long time, and know that I could never think otherwise: Result:
I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest
And for you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change
what we have always been & always will be to each other only now
you have two children to love & to love you and Eleanor as you
know will always be a daughter to you in every true way."

Eleanor wrote, too, addressing her letter to "Dear Cousin Sally."
"It is impossible for me to tell you how I feel toward Franklin," she
said. "I can only say that my one great wish is always to prove worthy
of him." Sara had been very good to her, she wrote. "I know just how
you feel & how hard it must be, but I do want you to learn to love me
a little."

Eleanor Roosevelt was never certain of anyone's love. In her volu
minous autobiographical writings she sought the reasons for her in
security in the half-remembered events of her parched childhood. She
puzzled over their meaning, turned them over and over, altered details,
rearranged their sequence, as if by doing so like a player at solitaire
who may find at any moment that she has dealt herself a winning hand
everything would suddenly fall into place.

But it never did for her. "She knew she had a ghastly childhood,"
her younger cousin Corinne Robinson Alsop once wrote, "but she
didn't realize how ghastly it was." What seems certain is that her early
years were nearly as empty of approval and constancy as Franklin's
were surfeited with them. Like Sara Delano Roosevelt, she worshipped
her father. "He was the center of my world," she said. But unlike

E is an Angel 261

Warren Delano, Elliott Roosevelt was a frail and unsteady object of
veneration.

He had seemed at first far more promising than his older brother,
Theodore, who was known as "Teedie" and "Thee" as a boy small,
spindly, at once hyperkinetic and bookish, with a voice that squeaked
when he was not wheezing with asthma. Elliott was taller, better-
looking, more athletic, good-humored, gregarious, and, according to
one childhood friend, "entirely lacking in Theodore's egotism." And
he was celebrated within the family for his tenderness and generosity:
he went out walking one wintry New York morning while still a small
boy wearing a new coat and returned without it; asked what had
happened, he said that he had given it to a poor boy who had seemed
cold.

But there was within him almost from the first a sad conviction that
he would never be able to hold his own in the loving but relentless
competition that characterized life among the Oyster Bay Roosevelts.
Theodore swiftly outdistanced him, and by the age of fifteen, Elliott
had completely subordinated himself to his older brother. "Oh father,"
he wrote that year, "will you ever think me a 'noble boy'? You are right
about [Teedie] he is one and no mistake, a boy I would give a good
deal to be like."

But he was not like him, could not make himself be like him. He
entered St. Paul's School at sixteen, where he did poorly and left in
the middle of the term after suffering a series of blinding headaches and
mysterious seizures which no amount of "anti-nervous" medication
seemed able to forestall. The best diagnosis doctors could offer was
periodic "congestion of the brain." Like Theodore's sieges of asthma,
which eased significantly as soon as he left home for Harvard and was
no longer in daily contact with his fond but demanding father, Elliott's
attacks may have been in part an unconscious avenue of escape from
competitive pressures he could not otherwise withstand. In any case,
they ruled out college and the unavoidable comparisons with Theo
dore it would have ensured. His health and sense of well-being seemed
always to flourish the further he went from home and responsibility,
and he spent nearly a year out west, happily hunting and ranching on
his own. Theodore joined him there one summer, and Elliott wrote
and illustrated an entertaining account of their adventures together in
which he referred to himself in the third person throughout as "Nell"
and "she," as if by being the first to point out what his brother and

262 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

father evidently considered his feminine weakness the charge could be
defused.

He was closer to his mother, whom he called "beloved Mother-
ling," than to his father, but when Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., fell fatally
ill with cancer of the bowel in 1878, it was Elliott who nursed him for
weeks, showing a devotion, his sister Corinne remembered, "so tender
that it was more like a woman"; and his failure to keep his father alive
may have added further to his seventeen-year-old's sense of his own
inadequacy.

In any case, two years later in the autumn of 1880, with Theodore
soon to run for the New York Assembly and already acting as head
of the family, Elliott set out upon a leisurely trip around the world,
to be interrupted by several months of big-game hunting in India. Sara
and Mr. James, then embarking on their honeymoon, were his fellow
passengers aboard the Germanic on the first leg of his journey; they
found him such good company that they urged him to make their
London rooms his own during his stay there, and later, when Franklin
was born, they asked him to be their boy's godfather.

Elliott was gracious and dashing, solicitous and genial, but incapa
ble of sustained effort; even the editing of his own letters from India
into a book intended to match Theodore's Hunting Trips of a Ranch
Man would prove too much for him. He claimed never to be jealous
of his brother's successes; he loved Theodore far too much for that, he
said; knew that his brother was a "far better man than he." Yet the very
effusiveness of his tributes to Theodore seems suspect, a mask for a
wealth of unacknowledged envy for the older brother who seemed
always able to do everything better than he could, "My darling old
brother," he wrote from India. "I would like to do anything under you,
Thee for you are the sort of man to lead at any kind of a hard time
or place, and I do feel such entire trust and confidence in your ability
and pluck that at anything from a 'bowery reform* politically to a boat
race I should like to put my strength to help yours and follow you
and I will, too, Teddy."

He seemed to feel vaguely guilty at indulging himself in India,
while his brother and sisters were settling down. He really ought to
get a job when he got home, he wrote to his new brother-in-law,
Corinne's husband, Douglas Robinson. "Are there no broad acres
covered with pine timber land set with gold and silver and coal near
you . . . which I might reclaim and make a fortune, Marry too, and
altogether not stand without the pale as I do? ... I cannot bear to think

E is an Angel 263

of living in New York as an idle man." But he also knew he lacked
the quality he called Theodore's u foolish grit," and he confessed to
Bamie that he was simply unable to adopt as his own "our way" the
Roosevelt way that meant "life for an end." And he had begun to
drink.

His failings were still kept largely within the family, however, and
when he returned to New York and entered Douglas Robinson's real
estate business he was thought a glamorous catch. So was Anna Hall,
just eighteen in the winter of 1881-82 and, in Elliott's words, "a tall
slender fair-haired little beauty just out and a great belle."

Friends brought them together, they fell almost instantly in love,
and at Algonac during a Memorial Day house party arranged for them
by their friend Laura Delano (just weeks before she burned to death),
they agreed to marry. The wedding was set for December first. Their
courtship provided vivid evidence that opposites attract. Anna was the
eldest of six children of Valentine G. Hall, Jr., a rich and reclusive
country gentleman who had never felt the need to work and who
brought up his family in a big secluded house called Oak Terrace at
Tivoli, up the Hudson from Hyde Park. He was puritanical and pious
a live-in clergyman was in constant attendance, his granddaughter
Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, "in order that he might have someone
with whom to talk on equal terms" and he at once tyrannized and
indulged his wife, Mary Livingston Ludlow, a member of two of the
oldest and most powerful River families. She was pampered with fine
clothes and jewelry but not allowed ever to shop on her own, not
taught even how to write a check, so that when her husband died in
1880, leaving her with six children under seventeen, she was at first
very nearly helpless. As the eldest, Anna did her best to help, but all
four of the youngest children were scarred by their fatherless upbring
ing. The two boys, Edward and Valentine, would eventually retreat
into a more or less permanent alcoholic haze.

Accustomed to the cheerless Hall household, in which self-denial
was the highest virtue and pleasure was dismissed as frivolity, Anna
was especially drawn to Elliott's gaiety and high spirits. She was often
bored. "I am just pining for excitement," she once told him, and he
did his best to provide it. He gave her a spectacular necklace fashioned
from the claws of a tiger he had shot in India, played tennis with her
on the Tivoli courts, took her for "jolly drives" along the nearby
Woods Road, and let her watch him play polo at the Meadow Brook
Club on Long Island.

264 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Elliott, in turn, saw in Anna's earnestness and reserve something
of the stability and substance he knew he lacked on his own, and he
worked hard to match it. He took her with him on his regular inspec
tions of the charities established by his late father the New York
Orthopaedic Hospital and the Newsboys Lodging House and he
offered to read aloud with her "some of my favorite chapters and verses
in the little Testament" that he said he found "a comforting and joyous
though silent companion," and carried with him wherever he went.

Their love letters were heady and joyous for the most part Elliott
thought Anna "my Queen, my Heaven, so holy, sacred & near God
are you" but here and there were hints of the trouble to come. Each
was jealous of the other. Anna worried that "the demon distrust" had
an unshakable grip on her; "I have such wretched feelings that I trust
nothing and no one." She worried, too, that she had told him too much
about herself, "not heard enough" about him. And Elliott already
suffered from unnerving spells of suspicion and despair. Make up your
mind that "you will be happy," Anna told him after receiving one
discouraged letter. "Say to yourself that you know I am true and that
you will trust people. It should make you feel so, so much happier."
Elliott vowed to banish all distrust: "I shall be pure in heart, noble in
honor and strong in love." But at least once, while visiting Anna at
Tivoli, he had some kind of seizure and had to be helped home on the
train.

Elliott's family was delighted with the match. Anna would provide
the motivation Elliott needed to make something of himself, Theodore
told Corinne; she would give "the dear old boy . . . something to work
for." The wedding itself at Calvary Episcopal Church, just around the
corner from the old Theodore Roosevelt home on East Twentieth
Street, on December 1, 1883, was "a Noted Hymeneal Event," accord
ing to one newspaper and "one of the brilliant social events of the
season" in the columns of another. Theodore was Elliott's best man.
Sara and Mr. James were among the guests that crowded into the
church; their unaccustomed absence had frightened two-year-old
Franklin, left behind for the day at Algonac.

The newlyweds were among the most popular young couples in
the same fashionable set in which their friends the Rosy Roosevelts
were so prominent. Anna helped establish a series of dances at Sherry's
restaurant, organized because even Mrs. Astor's Patriarchs' balls were
thought insufficiently exclusive by her and her friends. At Newport
and Meadow Brook and at the annual meet of the New York Coaching

E is an Angel 265

Club in Central Park, Anna was singled out for her beauty and the
grace of her carriage this last the legacy of her late father who had
insisted that she take long walks daily at Tivoli with a stick across the
small of her back, held in place by the crook of her elbows.

Eleanor Roosevelt would one day write that her mother had been
the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. A woman friend noted
that Anna "never entered a room as others did she seemed almost to
float forward." Robert Browning himself was so struck by her that he
begged to be allowed just to read aloud to her while she had her portrait
painted one summer when she and Elliott were in Switzerland. Co-
rinne Robinson Alsop also remembered the unique impact of Anna's
beauty. She was taken to the Elliott Roosevelts' for a Christmas party
as a very small child. The door flew open at her mother's knock, she
recalled, and "Uncle Ellie bounded down the stairs" and picked her
up in his arms; his genuine affection seemed palpable. But he was
entirely forgotten a moment later for "behind him on the stairs I saw
Aunt Anna, dressed in some blue-grey shimmery material. She seemed
so beautiful that the vision stayed with me all my childhood, and while
I was entranced by fairy tales, all the fairy godmothers were dressed
as Aunt Anna was dressed."

Anna Hall Roosevelt lived for that kind of admiration. Her "love
of the approbation of those dear to her was remarkable," one friend
wrote after her death; she had been "made for an atmosphere of ap
proval." She got plenty of it at first from her admiring husband, "the
most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew," according to a friend who had
known a good many of them.

In February of 1884, tragedy interrupted what must have seemed
an idyll to their friends when, on a single harrowing day, first Elliott's
mother and then Theodore's young wife, Alice Lee, died in the Roose
velt home on West Fifty-seventh street. "There is a curse on this
house," a distraught Elliott told his sister, Corinne, when she arrived.
"Mother is dying and Alice is dying too." Alice Roosevelt had suc
cumbed to Bright's disease just two days after giving birth to "Baby
Alice," the child that the unfailingly generous Bamie would raise until
her brother remarried in 1886. And so, when Anna found herself
pregnant that spring and often felt unwell, both she and Elliott were
especially anxious.

The safe healthy birth of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt on October 11,
1884, came as a great relief. To her father, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote,
"I was a miracle from heaven." His brother, Theodore, was her de-

266 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

lighted godfather. But to the mother for whom she was named she
seems to have been something of a disappointment, even an embarrass
ment, almost from birth. Anna Hall and all her sisters had been taught
that beauty and grace, charm and rectitude were the qualities that
mattered most in women. Eleanor did not measure up. She was plain
and grave, even as an infant. "Very solemn," she herself recalled,
"entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth." During
two of her early years she was made to wear an ugly, uncomfortable
steel brace to forestall curvature of the spine.

Something else may already have been at work within Anna as
well, something that would prevent her from developing for her
daughter the same warm maternal feeling that she would later display
toward her sons. Her marriage was already troubled. Despite his pro
mises, Elliott seemed unable really to settle down; he was already
spending a good deal of time away from home; ignored his business
in favor of hunting, yachting, drinking; and when he was with her had
begun privately to veer between depression and elation, exuberance
and self-loathing. Anna loved her husband, but nothing she could
think to do seemed to steady him. Perhaps Eleanor, who greatly resem
bled her father, came to seem to her a symbol of that growing difficulty
and of the feelings of dread and helplessness it had begun to engender.
Perhaps, too, the demands of caring for a genuine infant initially
seemed more than she could bear when her husband was himself
behaving more and more like a child.

Sometime during 1886, her parents took Eleanor with them on a
weekend visit to Springwood. Significantly perhaps, the point of the
trip was for her father to see his godson, Franklin, then four years old,
not for the James Roosevelts to see his daughter. This was the first
meeting between the children, though neither could remember it in
later years. Franklin was a dutiful host, tirelessly carrying his un
smiling two-year-old guest back and forth across the nursery floor on
his back. Later, Eleanor came down for tea but was too timid to
venture further than the parlor door, standing there in a starched white
frock, her finger in her mouth, until her exasperated mother called out,
"Come in Granny," explaining to Sara and Mr. James that she called
her daughter that because Eleanor was "such a funny child, so old-
fashioned." When Eleanor was old enough to understand this explana
tion, which her mother freely offered whenever strangers were pre
sent, it made her want to "sink through the floor in shame."

She would continue to suck her fingers well into her childhood,
and she chewed her fingernails later, stopping only when she reread

E is an Angel 267

a letter from her father in which he had urged that she "take good care
of those cunning wee hands that Father so loves to be petted by." She
would have done almost anything to please her father. All her earliest
memories centered around him. She remembered dressing up and
dancing for him when very small, solemnly whirling and pirouetting
in the dining room until he signaled an end to the performance by
sweeping her high into the air while the guests applauded, then kissing
her good night.

"With my father I was perfectly happy," she said. "He would take
me into his dressing room in the morning, or when he was dressing
for dinner, and let me watch each thing he did." The qualities in
Eleanor that bewildered and irritated her mother seemed to make
Elliott identify with her all the more closely. He had himself been a
disappointment to his family and to himself. Even his pet name for her
seemed to echo his sense of inadequacy. He had disparaged himself as
"Nell" when he was a boy; he now called his daughter "Little Nell,"
only in part after the heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop. And he
evidently found her premature solemnity engaging rather than odd,
asking her to pose especially sternly for a photographer, one small
admonitory finger raised, and then having a portrait painted from the
photograph which he liked to call "Little Nell Scolding Elliott."

She was not alone in scolding him; Anna was increasingly troubled
by Elliott's behavior. The Elliott Roosevelts were still among the city's
most sought-after couples, giving or attending dinners or dances or
theater parties nearly every evening of the week. A French nurse, her
name now lost, cared for Eleanor, watching her so closely that the little
girl was fluent in French before she could speak English.

But Elliott had grown increasingly erratic, by turns edgy and
ebullient at home, more and more involved with his hard-drinking,
hard-riding friends at Meadow Brook. In the spring of 1887, he sud
denly resigned from his brother-in-law's firm, explaining that he was
no longer up to the work. Something was seriously wrong, and Anna
suggested that rather than face another idle, purposeless summer on
Long Island they travel together to the Continent, taking her sister
Elizabeth, known as "Tissie," and Eleanor with them. Three months
of relaxation away from the anxieties and temptations of New York
should help restore her husband's equilibrium.

One of Franklin Roosevelt's first memories had been the air of calm
and confidence with which his parents had surrounded him at three
when they thought the Germania was going down. One of Eleanor

268 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Roosevelt's earliest memories, too, had been of a near-disaster at sea,
but its meaning and impact were entirely different.

One day out of port at about five in the afternoon and blanketed
in fog, their ship, the Britannic, was struck by another steamship, the
Celtic, her prow plunging ten feet into the Britannic' s steel side and
ripping away some twenty feet of thick plating that sheared its way
across the crowded steerage deck. A twelve-year-old girl was decapi
tated, her father dismembered. Other passengers were crushed under
great heaps of fallen superstructure, smashed lifeboats, and tackle. A
child's leg lay on the deck, the body to which it had been attached
evidently driven overboard. Injured men and women screamed. Water
poured through the torn hull. Panicky stokers seized and launched one
lifeboat; four more boats were lowered, filled with women and chil
dren, the captain standing by with a loaded pistol to make certain that
no men tried to crowd them out.

Elliott ushered Anna and her maid into one of them, then jumped
in beside them at the last moment, ordered to do so by an officer
because there were too few crewmen aboard to man the oars. He was
the only man among the cabin passengers to leave the Britannic. '

Eleanor did not consciously remember any of these details. "I
remember only that there was wild confusion," she wrote. "My father
stood in a boat below me, and I was dangling over the side to be
dropped into his arms. I was terrified and shrieking and clung to those
who were to drop me." Her father shouted encouragement, struggling
to stay on his feet in the crowded boat. The crewmen managed finally
to pry her fingers loose, and she fell screaming through the air to safety.

1. The Britannic did not sink, the crew having managed to staunch the inrushing water with
lashed-together mattresses, and she eventually managed to limp back to New York, alongside the
Celtic and escorted by three other liners. Most of her cabin passengers had remained aboard and,
once safely ashore, one of them, the California railroad millionaire, Collis P. Huntington, made
a point of scornfully mentioning Elliott Roosevelt's apparently premature flight to safety to the
newspapers. Only Elliott and John Paton, a prominent Wall Street banker, had accompanied the
women across to the Celtic, he told the World. Two days later, Paton wrote in to correct
Huntington's story. He had not left the Britannic to rejoin his wife and daughter until the crisis
had passed, he said. Elliott never bothered to write in his own defense. But Cecil H. Alleyne,
a fellow passenger and a friend of Elliott's, wrote to him from the Knickerbocker Club to express
his indignation at Huntington's unjustified attack: "I feel excessively annoyed at the manner in
which your name has been brought up. No one who saw the cool, collected and generous manner
in which you helped the 3rd officer's boat with women and children can help feeling distressed
at the sneer implied in Mr. Huntington's report. Mr. Mencken, the 3rd officer who ordered you
into the boat . . . told me that had you not obeyed his command to come aboard and take an oar
he would have had to put off for what at the time might have been a 350 mile row with one oar
short. . . . No one could have behaved with more coolness and bravery."

Sources: The New York World, May 23 and 24, 1887; Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by
the Children, FDRL. * F 7

E is an Angel 269

The Roosevelts were taken aboard the Celtic and returned to New
York, where they immediately booked passage to Europe on another

ship.

But the traumatized little girl now wept and shook at even the
thought of going to sea again. Her parents, still preoccupied with
getting abroad for the sake of Elliott's health, were baffled and irritated
by her obvious terror. No admonitions to be brave seemed to help.

Her great-aunt and -uncle, Mr. and Mrs. James King Gracie,
volunteered to care for Eleanor at their summer home at Oyster Bay
while Anna and Elliott went overseas; the Roosevelts planned to re
turn in August.

Aunt Gracie reported to Corinne on her trip home from New York
with her small grand-niece: "She was so little and gentle & had such
a narrow escape out of the great ocean that it made her seem doubly
helpless & pathetic. . . . She asked two or three times . . . where her
'dear Mamma was, & where her Papa was, & where is Aunt Tissie?'
I told her they have gone to Europe. She said 'where is baby's home
now?' I said 'baby's home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle and Aunt
Gracie' which seemed to satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came
near the Bay driving ... she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed
way 'Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat!."

Her parents stayed abroad for six months, not three, an unimagina
bly long span for a child still less than three years old. Anna worried
about her "I do so long for her," she wrote home but Elliott's
recovery came first. She knew it had been "wiser to leave her." Eleanor
collected eggs for breakfast at Oyster Bay, played quietly by herself on
the big empty grounds of the Gracie estate, listened to stories of Brer
Rabbit her Aunt Gracie had learned as a girl in Georgia. She seemed
content enough, if awfully quiet, but inside herself Eleanor was sure
she was being punished. If she had been brave, as her father had asked
her to be, she would be with him and with her mother; because she
had not been, she had been abandoned. It was the first of a long series
of separations from her parents, each of which she saw as abandonment

or exile.

"Fear has always seemed to me the worst stumbling block which
anyone has to face," she would write many years later. "It is the great
crippler. Looking back it strikes me that my childhood and my early
youth were one long battle against fear." That battle continued una
bated all her life. She never entirely conquered her terror of the sea,
but nothing else was ever allowed to frighten her if she could help it.

270 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

It was her future husband who would declare that "the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."
But it was Eleanor who knew it first and most unmistakably.

Her parents finally returned to her in the autumn of 1887, rented
a cottage at Hempstead, just a few miles from Meadow Brook, and
began to build themselves a splendid new summer house. Although
Elliott generally felt better after his half-year abroad and was wel
comed into his Uncle Grade's realty firm, he was already eager to get
back among his sporting companions. Soon he was riding as recklessly
as ever, breaking first an arm and then his collarbone in pursuit of foxes
and, after recovering from both falls, organizing and leading a mid
night hunt, hurtling walls and ditches in the dark. He was always ready
for risks, liked to live at the edge, as if determined to prove his bravery
to others and to himself. 2

Theodore, who was himself no stranger to risk-taking, worried
about him, wondering if a warning against "imprudence" would help
or only make matters worse. "I do hate his Hempstead life," he told
Bamie. "I don't know whether he could get along without the excite
ment now, but it is very unhealthy and it leads to nothing."

His Hempstead life delighted Eleanor. The year she spent with her
parents there may have been the most contented of her childhood. She
was u as happy as the day is long," Elliott noted. "Baby Eleanor goes
up to look after [the new house] every day and calls it hers." Her father
was often home (though when he was not, Anna wrote, Eleanor could
be "fiendish"). There were puppies and kittens with which to tumble
on the lawn, and her Cousin Alice often came to play. In October of
1888, "the funny little tot had a happy [fourth] birthday," her father

2. His motivation may have been still more self-destructive. Elliott once wrote a curious and
melodramatic short story called "Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?" Its date is unknown, and
he does not seem ever to have tried to have it published. The protagonist is a beautiful unmarried
woman nearing forty who has fallen on hard times. When an old and dogged suitor proposes
marriage as a solution to her problems, she turns him away. "My life has been a gamble," she
explains. "I lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly
avoid it. ... I knew the end had to come some time, but I never thought of it. I hoped against
hope that something would turn up to pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler." With
that, she retires to her hotel room, lights candles on her dresser, and gazes at herself in the mirror
while holding a pistol to her heart. Before she pulls the trigger, she muses aloud, "What a
frivolous, useless thing you were. Still, you never did anyone any harm but yourself and now
there will be no one to regret you."

For Miss Vedder, death was preferable to responsibility. The problem for Elliott was that
he had been unable to avoid responsibility and its terrors; there were plenty of people to regret
him.

Source: Elliott Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

E is an Angel 271

assured Bamie, u and ended by telling me when saying goodnight (after
Anna heard her say her prayers) that she loved everybody and every
body loved her. Was it not cunning?" It was also uncharacteristic; she
would rarely feel that way again.

They moved into their new home in the late spring of 1889. Shortly
thereafter, Elliott shattered his ankle practicing somersaults for a soci
ety circus. The ankle set badly, had to be broken and reset. "I remem
ber the day very well," Eleanor wrote, "for we were alone in his room
when he told me about it. Little as I was, I sensed that this was a terrible
ordeal, and when he went hobbling out on crutches to the waiting
doctors, I was dissolved in tears."

Weeks of agony followed, weeks when Elliott grew to rely still
more heavily on alcohol and drugs. The pain eventually abated; the
twin addictions it had encouraged never did.

Anna was now pregnant again, and as the birth of her second child
drew near, Eleanor was sent away, this time to stay with her Grand
mother Hall at Tivoli. In her autobiography, Eleanor made a curious
but perhaps revealing error. After recounting what she could remem
ber of her frightening experience at sea and of her long lonely stay with
the Gracies while her parents were abroad, she writes, "One little
brother must have been born about this time, Elliott Roosevelt, Jr., but
of his arrival I have no recollection whatsoever." Actually, two years
had intervened between these events; Elliott, Jr., was born in the
autumn of 1889. But the fact that she later believed his birth had
coincided so closely with what she saw as her parents' abandonment
of her may have meant that her brother's arrival, too, when it eventu
ally came, had seemed to her child's mind still another punishment.
Her parents would not have needed another child if she had been all
that they had hoped she would be.

The first of her letters to have survived, dictated from Tivoli to her
mother's sister, Edith, known to Eleanor as Aunt Pussie, treats the
baby's birth with obvious ambivalence:

"Dear Father, I hope you are well and Mother too. I hope little
brother doesn't cry but if he does tell the nurse to give him a tap tap
tap. ... I love you very much and Mother and Brother, too, if he has
blue eyes. Your precious little Eleanor."

Her father was delighted with his son "simply adores him," Anna
noted but his dependence on liquor and narcotics was steadily wors
ening. He again gave up business, and sometimes became so "excited,"
Anna noted, that he was "unnatural," yet could not abide inactivity.

272 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

He tried to resume his riding, fell from his horse, and was kicked in
the head; he began to talk openly of suicide and finally fled to the south
in search of a cure. Eleanor was again greatly disturbed at his absence,
desperate to have him back. "Eleanor lunched with us yesterday," her
Aunt Tissie wrote Elliott. "She rushes to the stairs every time the bell
rang to see if it was her Papa. 'I shall be so glad to see my dear father,'
she kept saying."

Anna did her best to hold her family together while encouraging
Elliott toward self-control. It was painful for her to be apart from him.
She and the children would help him wage "that old hard fight," she
assured him, "but Nell, it must be an entire conquest. A partial one is
no good. . . . We can't do without you. ... I do love you so and want
you to be my darling strong boy," she said. "I think I would be the
happiest woman living if you would ever be well and give up all wines
and medicines. Do, dear, throw your horrid cocktails away."

But he could not do it. He returned to her little better than when
he left, and plunged immediately back into the old reckless life. Theo
dore now noticed that ordinary conversation with Elliott was no
longer possible; his brother would begin a story, forget what he had
been trying to say, lapse into bewilderment and despair. And he wan
dered the house at night, unable to sleep; he vanished for days at a time
and pursued other women. One of them, a pretty housemaid named
Katy Mann, he secretly brought to his own bedroom; she became
pregnant. In July of 1890, Anna determined that the whole family
should go abroad to see if a year or more spent quietly in the health
resorts of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy might bring Elliott to his
senses and save their marriage.

The trip went well enough at first. Elliott tried hard not to drink;
Anna watched him closely, and European friends also helped keep him
sober. In Berlin, when the Roosevelts went backstage at Buffalo Bill's
Wild West with Count Sierstoff, an old hunting companion of Elli
ott's, the showman poured Elliott a glass of whiskey with which to
drink his health. Sierstoff took it from Elliott's hand, explaining that
his doctors forbade it.

For five-year-old Eleanor, the tour was unalloyed joy: despite the
terrors of the Atlantic crossing, she was with her father every day. All
her life she would treasure her few oddly selective memories of their
travels together. At Venice, her father had insisted on poling his own
gondola along a canal, she remembered, "singing with the other boat
men, to my intense joy." And when she begged for her own glass of

E is an Angel 273

the frothy, delicious-looking drink being enjoyed at the other tables at
a German outdoor cafe, he ordered one for her, insisting that "if you
have it you have to drink the whole glass." She did, hating the bitter
taste. She was "disillusioned and disappointed," she wrote, but by the
beer (which she never learned to like), not by her father, never by her
father.

Only her timidity seemed to annoy him, and because it did, she did
her best to disguise it from him. Riding a donkey in the mountains
above Sorrento and faced with an especially steep downhill slope, she
was unable to keep from turning pale while her father was watching.
Forty years later, she said, she could "remember still the tone of
disapproval in his voice, though his words of reproof have long since
faded away."

Those words or their cruel gist later came back to her. In an
article written in 1939 she described the scene as if it had happened to
someone else: " 'You are not afraid are you?' The tone was incredu
lous, astonished, and the man looked down from his horse to the child
on her small donkey. The eyes were kind, but she sat shivering and
hung back, looking at the steep descent. A steely look came into the
man's eyes and in a cold voice he said: 'You may go back if you wish,
but I did not know you were a coward.' "

Though Eleanor could not know it, her father's uncharacteristic
harshness toward her on the hillside above Sorrento was a symptom
of the personal agony through which he and her mother were now
passing. For several weeks, he had been without the comforting oblivi-
ousness alcohol always induced in him. There were "awful attacks of
depression every day," Anna told Bamie; some were dispelled in mo
ments; others could only be overcome by hours of rapid walking on
his painful, poorly knit ankle. Anna offered encouragement but also
maintained a strict and distrustful vigilance. She had become more
keeper than wife. At Salzburg in early October, the Roosevelts spent
several days in the country home of another old hunting friend, Count
Arco. Elliott was "an angel up to Wednesday night," Anna reported
to Bamie, and since she was exhausted and did not feel well, she had
taken to her bed that evening. "Then I think he drank champagne for
dinner, though he denies it. Think of my position. I could not leave
my bed. He got through without excess but I feel quite sure he took
something . . . that night, too, but nothing to be noticed." Though still
ill, Anna stayed by his side all the next day. By Sunday, she continued,
Elliott was terribly "restless . . . and I knew if it were possible he would

274 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

get something." He slipped out of his room and down the stairs. Anna
heard him, and "I immediately followed. Tried the drawing room,
sitting room, and finally the smoking room. There he was with the
brandy and water. Nothing was left out at Arco's, the head butler
having the keys. [Elliott] had ordered it and was setting down the first
glass. I was furious. Said so. It affected him at once ... I don't think
the [other guests] could have noticed." Neither, of course, did Eleanor.

Elliott managed to keep from taking another drink for the next few
days, and Anna, grasping at the slimmest suggestion of his improve
ment, saw in this proof of "how much better he is. But Bamie," she
continued, "I have never been so worried about him as for the past
week." Elliott had fallen into a "melancholy from which nothing
rouses him." He could not sleep at all, "believes himself everlastingly
lost . . . irrevocably disgraced . . . [believes also that] as long as he stays
with us he injures the children and myself. ... I stayed awake three
nights fearing his mind would give way. . . . He also believes there is
something dreadful awaiting us in the near future."

By midwinter of 1891 it was clear that Elliott could not be restored
to health on his own. He entered an Austrian sanitarium. Anna, now
pregnant again and with two children to care for, sent for Bamie to
come and help her. In April, for reasons still unclear, the Roosevelts
suddenly left Austria and rented a small house at Neuilly on the
outskirts of Paris, where they would await the baby's arrival.

Eleanor was again an inconvenience. Not yet seven, she was sent
off to a convent school to be "out of the way." There, too, she felt
herself an intruder. The other girls spent hours decorating their shrine
to the Madonna. Eleanor, a Protestant, was not allowed near it. In
stead, she remembered, she was "always kept on the outside and wan
dered by myself in the walled-in garden." There, one day in late June,
she would learn that she now had a second baby brother, named Hall.

Years later, recalling her loneliness and fear at the convent, she still
thought her misery must somehow have been her own fault. The
problem had been "her own inordinate desire for affection and praise,"
she concluded, perhaps brought on by the fact that her mother had
made her "keenly conscious of my own shortcomings." In fact, of
course, her desire for praise and affection, for the normal outward signs
of parental approval, was the inevitable result of having had so little
of either. Nonetheless, still blaming herself, she explained that she then
"fell prey to temptation." Another little girl had swallowed a coin,
frightening the sisters but riveting the attention of the other girls. "She

E is an Angel 27 '5

was the center of everyone's interest," Eleanor wrote. "I longed to be
in her place." But more important, the other girl had been sent home
to recuperate, and that, above all, was what Eleanor wanted most for
herself.

She told one of the sisters that she, too, had swallowed a coin. She
was not believed. She insisted that she was telling the truth. The sisters
demanded she confess. Trapped, she fell silent. Her mother was sum
moned, told her daughter was a liar and incorrigible, and asked to take
her away from the school.

"The drive home was one of utter misery," Eleanor remembered,
her mother steadily berating her as they rode together in the carriage,
and continuing her denunciation even after they reached their house.
"I could bear swift punishment of any kind far better than long scold
ings," she recalled. Scoldings put into words her darkest secret fears
about her own worth; she was now officially a liar as well as a coward.

She found her father at home when she got there and gratefully
remembered that he had been the only person in the household who
"did not treat me as a criminal." In a brief tactful passage that consti
tutes the closest she ever came to criticizing her father in print, Eleanor
added that while she was away at the convent, he had given u my
mother and his sister a great deal of anxiety."

In fact, he had been making their lives what Theodore called "a
brooding nightmare." Paris had proved too tempting for Elliott to
resist. He disappeared into the city for days at a time, took a mistress
a married American expatriate with two children, Mrs. Florence
Bagley Sherman of Detroit again talked of suicide, and when, back
in New York, Katy Mann, the domestic who had now borne his
illegitimate son, went to the family lawyers and threatened to expose
him if the child was not adequately provided for, he was unable even
to tell Anna whether or not the baby could be his.

His brother, now one of three public service commissioners in
Washington, was outraged. The scandal could damage his career, but
far worse was the knowledge that his own brother had now shown
himself to be "a maniac morally as well as mentally," u a flagrant
man-swine" who had betrayed his wife and family. For Anna to go on
living with him would be "little short of criminal. She ought not to
have any more children, and those she has should be brought up away
from him." The family would pay to silence Katy Mann the story
never did reach the newspapers but Elliott must be locked up in an
asylum for "a term of years." If he did not go voluntarily, Theodore

276 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

and Bamie would go to court in New York to have him declared
mentally incompetent.

Elliott struck back. He would divorce his wife if she dared leave
his side, he said, and would cut the children from his will. Finally in
early June his "violence" caused Anna, then nearly nine months preg
nant, to suffer what Bamie called an "hysterical attack." Bamie had him
seized "kidnapped," Elliott complained and placed in the Chateau
Suresne, a nearby asylum. But he did not stay there long. When Hall
Roosevelt was born on June 28, Elliott was back at his wife's bedside.
Theodore thought Anna's having sent for her husband markedly
"foolish" and despaired at the legacy the new baby had inherited from
his father, but perhaps Anna had hoped that being present at the birth
of their third child might finally remind Elliott of how close they once
had been, of how close they could be again if only he would reform.

If so, she was mistaken. He could no longer control himself,
moaned that he was losing his mind, fended off the invisible demons
of delirium tremens. This was the father to whom Eleanor returned
from the convent. Yet all she remembered of this grisly time was that
he had been momentarily kinder to her than her harassed, drained,
preoccupied mother had been.

Anna and her children and Bamie returned to New York in Au
gust. Elliott remained behind, back in the Chateau Suresne. The Elliott
Roosevelts would never again live together as a family.

Theodore and Bamie did go to court later that summer. Several
New York dailies ran front-page stories headed ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT
INSANE. Theodore's affidavit charged that his brother's unfortunate
madness had been "produced or aggravated, to what extent could not
be definitely told, by excessive alcoholism." Elliott denied the charge
in a letter written from the asylum to the New York Herald. He was
neither insane nor an alcoholic, he claimed, merely suffering from the
effect upon his nervous system of too many riding mishaps. His
brother and sister did not back down, however, and in January of 1892,
Theodore traveled to Paris to confront him. The suit would be
dropped and Anna would not seek a divorce provided Elliott returned
to the United States at the end of his six months in the Chateau
Suresne, underwent a five-week "cure" at a sanitarium for wealthy
alcoholics run by a Dr. Keeley at Dwight, Illinois, then agreed to
spend two full years of probation on his own and away from his wife
and children. Elliott surrendered, Theodore wrote Bamie, "was utterly

E is an Angel 211

broken, submissive and repentant . . . and said he would do all in his
power to prove himself really reformed. He was in a mood that was
terribly touching. How long it will last of course no one can say."

It did not last long. Elliott made it through the Keeley cure because
it was "Anna's wish," but then tried to renegotiate his probation so that
he might be able to demonstrate his new-found steadiness "in my
family with the aid and strengthening influence of Home." He was
alternately repentant and angry now, and uniformly self-pitying. It
was "wicked and foolish" to force him to endure this trial on his own,
he said, but "the spirit in which I do what Anna demands is one of
entire unselfishness and self-abnegation." His wife's resolution wav
ered momentarily, then held firm. Elliott could not come home; she
missed him terribly, but neither she nor the children could endure
another reconciliation that did not take.

Stung, Elliott now accused her of having a lover, charged that Hall
had not been his child. Anna wearily forwarded his letter to Bamie
as she now routinely did with all her correspondence with her husband
along with a despairing note of her own: "His letter is certainly that
of a madman. First he brings the most abominable charges against me.
Then says I am a noble woman & he trusts me entirely. ... I would
like to write and tell him that he had to take back what he said in
writing, or if he really thought it, to write and say with whom, when
and where, so I could disprove his statements. . . . And yet his letter
is so hopelessly sad . . . and yet I feel I ought not on his account pass
this over again, nor on the child's."

Elliott settled in the small Virginia town of Abingdon, where he
was to manage Douglas Robinson's sprawling mountain properties,
and where no one had ever seen anyone quite like him. He took rooms
first above a store and then in the home of a judge's elderly widow,
who found him delightful "He was the life of every party," a local
newspaperman wrote many years later, without apparent irony and
after interviewing elderly residents of the town. "The girls and young
ladies were in the height of their glory when invited to drive with him
behind his fast-stepping trotters." He kept a pack of hunting dogs and
a stable of horses, organized winter coasting parties and after-dinner
singalongs, and did trick riding, too, specializing in gallops across the
railroad trestle west of town just ahead of oncoming trains. His respon
sibilities included the coalfields at Coeburn, sixty miles away across the
mountains, and he was warmly remembered by the hill people at
whose cabins he stopped along the way. He was fond of cold butter-

278 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

milk, they recalled, and if he helped himself to some while they were
not at home, he always left a shiny five-dollar gold piece on the kitchen
table. Even the miners who worked for him liked him. 3

Just as he had functioned best as a boy the farther he got from his
father and older brother, so he was now doing better without responsi
bility for his wife and family. But he was embittered by his exile, and
was drinking again whenever he was alone. One evening, drunk and
naked, he knocked over a lamp and burned himself badly. Abingdon
friends wrote to Theodore, suggesting he come down and try to
"influence" his brother, but he refused. "It was absolutely useless," he
said.

For several weeks that summer, Anna took her children to Bar
Harbor, Maine, where as always her beauty attracted the attention of
a number of men. She attended a "beauty dinner" at the cottage of the
Turkish ambassador and was universally thought the most striking of
all the guests. But she remained married, did not wish ever to overstep
the bounds of propriety or do anything to encourage gossip. She
consulted Bamie as to what she could and could not do. Might she, for
example, go riding or rowing with a man provided she never went
again? It was u an awful temptation," she wrote, "when one feels
desperately lonely and wildly furious with the world at large, not to
make up one's mind to pay no attention to criticism as long as one does
no wrong and to try to get some fun out of the few years of our youth.
I hate everything and everyone and so am most of the time so miserable
that I feel anything one could do would be a comfort to forget for one
moment."

In the evenings at Bar Harbor, Eleanor sometimes lay in bed,
pretending to be asleep, and listened to her mother and her aunts and
uncles murmur anxiously about Elliott. "Something was wrong with
my father," she concluded, "but from my point of view nothing could
be wrong with him." Nor would anyone tell her exactly why it was
that he was not with them. "If people only realized what a war goes
on in a child's mind and heart in a situation of this kind," she wrote
many years later, "I think they would try to explain more than they
do to children."

But if she was unsure of the causes of the war, she had not a

3. When one old woman with whom he had often stayed was told some years later that
Elliott's brother, Theodore, was now President, she replied that for that reason alone he deserved
the job.

Source: Richmond Times Dispatch, February 24, 1935.

E is an Angel 279

moment's doubt as to whose side she was on. Back in New York that
autumn, Eleanor remained fearful, withdrawn, lonely. When she was
taken to parties she burst into tears at being among "strange children."
And, although Anna tried hard to provide reassurance she seemed as
powerless to help Eleanor as she had been to aid Elliott. Even when
she set aside what she called "mother's hour" each evening from six
to seven to read to Eleanor and her brothers, the little girl felt "a
curious barrier between myself and those three." Elliott, she remem
bered, was always angelic, "so good he never had to be reproved," and
little Hall was content just to rest quietly on his mother's lap. Eleanor
sat apart from the others on a footstool, gazing up into her mother's
face, quiet, unsmiling, reproachful.

How much the barrier between them was of her own making, it
is impossible now to judge. She did not understand what had gone
wrong between her parents. Nor had she any idea of how hard her
mother had struggled to keep the family together. All she knew was
that her mother had now sent her father away. That knowledge bred
a terrible anger, an anger apparently so frightening that she dared not
express it openly. The result then (and throughout her life, whenever
someone had angered or disappointed her) was aggrieved silence. 4

Her anxious distracted mother knew something was seriously
wrong between them and tried to give Eleanor special attention. It
was she, not her younger brothers, who was allowed to sleep in her
mother's bedroom. Anna made a point of reading aloud to her daily,
and often kept Eleanor with her after mother's hour while the nurse
put the boys to bed, but with her acute child's sensitivity the little
girl sensed always that in doing these things for her, her mother was
making "a great effort," and was all the more alienated. Her mother,

4. Mrs. Sherman, Elliott's mistress in Paris, had thought Theodore and Anna cruel to force
him to leave France and undergo the Keeley cure. "How could they treat so noble and generous
a man as they have," she wrote in her diary the day he left Paris for Illinois. "He is more noble
a figure in my eyes than either his wife or brother. She is more to be despised, in her virtuous
pride, her absolute selfish position than the most miserable woman I know, but she is the result

of our unintelligent, petty, conventional social life If she were only large-souled enough to

appreciate him." A year later, on the anniversary of his departure from her and only a few weeks
after Anna died, she added a note in the margin: "I am sorry if these words seem cruel now, but
death cannot alter the truth. January 28, 1893."

Some years later she sent this and three other brief entries from her diary having to do with
Elliott to his sympathetic sister Corinne. Still later, Corinne evidently sent them on to Eleanor,
who kept them carefully all her life in a little scrapbook labeled "For Anna's Children," which
had been compiled by Grandmother Hall or one of Eleanor's aunts and was otherwise filled with
affectionate tributes' to her mother. Mrs. Sherman's views of Anna more accurately mirrored
Eleanor's own.

Source: Anna Hall Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

280 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

she once wrote with cold precision, was both "kindly and indiffer
ent."

Only once in all her writings did Eleanor Roosevelt recall an
instance in which she displayed her rage at her mother in front of
others, and then she did it so indirectly that neither she nor her mother
was sure just what had happened. When the little family first returned
from Europe, Eleanor's Great-Aunt Maggie Ludlow, whose house
stood next door to Oak Terrace at Tivoli, was horrified to learn that
in their desperate flights in search of a cure for Elliott's afflictions, her
grand-niece's parents had ignored the child's education. At seven,
Eleanor could neither read nor write well, nor could she cook or sew.
Mrs. Ludlow, who was "very handsome, very sure of herself," Eleanor
recalled, rebuked Anna for what she said was her irresponsibility and
directed her own companion, an Alsatian seamstress named Made
leine, to move in and make up for lost time.

The next fall, Anna herself sought a more systematic solution to the
problem. She moved into a new house at Sixty-first and Madison,
transformed a room on its top floor into a schoolroom, hired Frederic
Roser, a fashionable schoolmaster, and his female assistant, and invited
the daughters of seven friends to share Eleanor's lessons. Anna came
to the class the first day and seated herself in the back of the room. So
did the mothers of several of the other girls. Eleanor was asked to stand
and spell a series of words no more complex than "horse," words she
already knew perfectly well. She suddenly seemed unable to spell even
the simplest of them. She stammered, started over, lapsed into silence,
and was asked finally to resume her seat. "I was always disgracing my
mother," Eleanor remembered later. "She took me aside afterwards
and told me seriously that she wondered what would happen if I did
not mend my ways!" Eleanor blamed her own otherwise inexplicable
failure on her shyness, and perhaps that was all it had been. But no
more dramatic tableau could have been staged to point up publicly
what she saw as her mother's neglect of her.

Eleanor Roosevelt's autobiography does include one revealing in
stance of closeness with her mother during their brief time together.
In New York that winter Anna suffered from shattering headaches, so
painful and so unrelenting that she spent hours in bed with the curtains
drawn until they passed. Eleanor would sit with her silently in the
dark, stroking her head. "People have since told me that I have good
hands for rubbing," she wrote, "and perhaps even as a child there was

E is an Angel 281

something soothing in my touch, for she was willing to let me sit there
for hours on end. The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest
joy I experienced."

That would be true all her life. To be useful was to feel that she
belonged to somebody; if she could not be loved, she could be needed.

In October of 1892, just six weeks after moving into her new home,
Anna underwent surgery for some unknown malady. Yet again, Elea
nor was sent away during a family crisis, first to the Grades' (where
she celebrated her eighth birthday), and then to Oak Terrace.

Elliott begged to be allowed to visit Anna. His mother-in-law
refused to permit it. Corinne, who had been the most sympathetic of
his siblings and was therefore the one he now trusted most, was desig
nated to tell him why. When Anna went under the ether, Corinne
explained, she had cried out that she no longer had the desire to live;
life with Elliott had become unbearable. Elliott wrote back directly to
Mrs. Hall: "Did she say she wanted to die, that I had made her so
utterly miserable that she did not care to live any more? And did you
say that was what your poor child had been suffering in silence all these
past killing months? ... I have no excuse to offer. I am certainly not
crazy. I have tried to do right. . . . Know, Mrs, Hall, that for all the
suffering I have caused I have suffered ten-fold more myself. For it was
7 who sinned and / know it, and I had none of the Divine comfort of
being able to grant forgiveness. "

Anna seemed to rally after the operation, then contracted diphthe
ria. Again Elliott pleaded to be permitted to come: "I ought to be with
her unless my presence is actually distasteful to her." It was. Anna had
her mother wire back, "Do not come." By now Elliott was consumed
only with his own plight. His wife's illness was forgotten. "Oh, Mrs.
Hall," he wrote, "I have been so much alone. . . . My nature is really
starved for love." He could not understand why Anna said she feared
him. "Before God, I say it, I am honestly worthy of her trust and love
for even in my drinking I never did a dishonorable thing, nor one
cruel act towards my wife and children."

But most of his married life had been a cruel act, even if he had been
genuinely helpless to make it otherwise, and Mrs. Hall did not relent.
Anna died on December seventh without seeing her husband again.
He hurried north as soon as he got the news and wept at the sight of
his wife in her coffin, still lovely in a pale pink wrapper, white lace

282 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

gathered at her wrists and throat. 5 She had left the children in the care
of her mother in her will, but both the Halls and Roosevelts now
worried that Elliott might sue for his children in court or even resort
to kidnapping. Theodore's second wife, Edith Carow, suggested that
a good nurse be hired right away for Elliott, Jr., and for Hall, so that
if Elliott insisted "on taking the little boys to Virginia ... at this age
they cannot come to much harm. ... I cannot help feeling he would
tire of them in a short time." Eleanor presented a more delicate prob
lem. She was old enough to be permanently affected by being around
the women "of very doubtful character" with whom Edith believed
Elliott continued to surround himself. She should be sent off immedi
ately to boarding school: "I do really think if anything . . . can be done
for Eleanor it will be by a good school. I do not feel she has much
chance, poor little soul."

Neither family need have worried. Elliott was no longer able to be
consistent even in his grief or his yearning for his children. At a ghastly
Christmas dinner at Eleanor's Aunt Tissie's he appalled the other
guests by breaking into jubilant song. He had been "gay as a butterfly,"
Bamie told Theodore, "drinking and singing all the comic songs." He
did not contest his wife's will.

"I can remember standing by a window when Cousin Susy [Parish]
told me that my mother was dead," Eleanor wrote. "She was very
sweet to me, and I must have known that something terrible had
happened/' She "must have known," yet her initial reaction was not of
her own loss but of "the one fact [that] wiped out everything else my
father was back and I would see him very soon." Her thoughts were all
of him, of how her mother's death would affect him, and of how she
would now be able to comfort him in his sorrow. It had been "a tragedy
of utter defeat for him. No hope now of ever wiping out the sorrowful
years he had brought upon my mother and she had left her mother as
guardian for her children He had no wife, no children, no hope!"

The new house was sold, Eleanor, her brothers, and their belong
ings were moved to Grandmother Hall's narrow brownstone on West
Thirty-seventh Street. "After we were installed my father came to see

5. She was just twenty-nine. Her death was only a slight disturbance on the surface of the
New York society in which she had played so prominent a part. A society columnist noted: "It
had been thought that the sad death of young Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt who, had she lived, would
have been one of the patronesses, would have greatly dimmed the brilliance of the [ball at
Sherry's], but New York is a large town and Ve are soon forgot/ so that the absence of the few
who stayed away was hardly noticed."

Source: Anna Hall Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

E is an Angel 283

me," Eleanor wrote, "and I remember going down into the high
ceilinged dim library. . . . He sat in a big chair. He was dressed all in
black, looking very sad. He held out his arms and gathered me to him.
In a little while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was
gone, that she had been all the world to him, and now he had only my
brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young, and that he
and I must keep close together. Some day I would make a home for
him again; we would travel together and do many things which he
painted as interesting and pleasant, to be looked forward to in the
future together.

"Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether
my brothers were to be our children or whether he felt that they would
be at school and college and later independent.

"There started that day a feeling which never left me that he and
I were very close together, and some day, would have a life of our own
together. He told me to write to him often, not to give any trouble,
to study hard, to grow up into a woman he could be proud of.

"When he left, I was all alone to keep our secret of mutual under
standing and to adjust myself to my new existence."

Later, she would add that she had made herself "as the years went
on into a fairly good copy of the picture he had painted," so that she
might be ready when "the wonderful day came" when she and her
father would "fare forth together." But of course that day never came.

He wrote to her regularly from Virginia at first, long emotional
letters addressed to "Father's Own Little Nell" and filled with exhorta
tions to study hard and learn the discipline he so conspicuously lacked
so that "Then! Oh, my pretty companionable Little Daughter, you
will come to Father and what games we will have together to be sure."
He told her of his horses, of his six dogs "Fox terriers Mr. Belmont
gave me (to comfort me in my loneliness)" and of the other little girls
he now saw regularly while Eleanor could not see him at all. She must
not be jealous of them, he said, for "No other little girl can ever take
your place in my heart."

On Easter Sunday in 1893, he told her he had "thought of you all
day long, " then went on, with a cruelty no less searing for being
unconscious, to talk of "Little Miriam . . . who every night comes into
my room and I do so often wish it were . . . you." The fields, he
continued, "are covered with a soft mat of thick blue grass and painted
by the most lovely blue and white violets. . . . They smell so sweet.

284 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Just like your sweet little self when I pick you up and bury my face
in those soft baby cheeks." Eleanor kept his letters all her life.

Later that spring, both of Eleanor's brothers came down with
scarlet fever. Eleanor was immediately sent out of harm's way to stay
with the Ludlows at their summer home in Newport. Hall recovered.
Elliott, Jr., developed diphtheria and did not. Their father raced north
again, this time to find his eldest son dying. He wired Eleanor that
"dear little Ellie" would not live. She wrote back, trying at age eight
to offer grown-up solace to her father: "We must remember that Ellie
is going to be safe in heaven and to be with Mother who is waiting
there and our Lord wants Ellie with him now, we must be happy and
do God's will and we must cheer others who feel it too."

"My little brother Ellie was simply too good for this world," Elea
nor wrote many years later; the unspoken corollary of that belief was
that she herself was not so good. Perhaps she saw in her brother's early
death still another instance of her own failings; as her dead mother's
surrogate she should somehow have been able to prevent it. She would
later almost desperately seek to serve as a mother to Hall, to make him
feel "as if he belonged to somebody," she said.

Elliott's unreliability now increased. He wrote less often and when
he did, seemed to take unconscious pleasure in describing the fun he
had with other children. He rode each morning with six of them, he
told Eleanor, "over these broad fields for one or two hours; we ...
never fail to return without roses in the cheeks of those I now call my
children. Do you continue to ride? Learn the right way so that I will
not have to teach you all over again." He also arranged to have the two
children of Mrs. Sherman write letters to Eleanor, carefully explaining
that their mother had been his "good friend" in Paris in what seems
clearly to have been a way of getting back at his unforgiving mother-
in-law. And he repeatedly failed to visit when he had promised to do
so. Eleanor never let her faith in him weaken. Between visits she
memorized verse with which she hoped to please him, learning all of
"Hiawatha" because he once said he liked it. Gifts sometimes arrived
from him a puppy, a kitten, a pony the week her brother died. Small
tokens for the most part, but enough so that later she would write that
her father "had loved to give and tried always to find just the thing
which would rejoice the heart of the one receiving his gift. You always
felt surrounded by his thought and love."

She was as eager to see him as she had been when she was an infant.
But when he did turn up things did not always go well, though

E is an Angel 285

Eleanor did her best every time to be worthy of his time and interest.
She was sure he thought her a coward he had told her so knew that
she must never again betray her fear as she had after the long-ago
disaster at sea; otherwise he might not come back at all He arrived to
take her driving one afternoon, and as he urged his favorite hunter,
Mohawk, up Madison Avenue, the horse was startled by a streetcar,
reared, and plunged. Her father lost his silk hat getting him under
control again, and while a policeman dusted off the hat and brought
it to him, he turned to Eleanor and asked, "You weren't afraid, were
you, Little Nell?" She swore she had not been. Later, in Central Park
and impatient at finding himself at the tail end of a long line of
slow-moving carriages, he laughed and told her, "If I were to say
'hoopla' to Mohawk he would try to jump them all." Eleanor smiled
as if enchanted by the idea, but "inwardly I prayed that he would do
nothing of the kind. In spite of my abject terror, these drives were the
high point of my existence."

Another time, out for a walk with Eleanor and three of his cher
ished terriers, he was evidently overcome with the need for a drink.
He stopped in front of the Knickerbocker Club, handed Eleanor the
dogs' leashes and told her to wait with the doorman, then hurried
inside. He did not return for six hours, or so Eleanor remembered, and
when he did he emerged unconscious, helped into a passing cab by the
porters. The doorman sent Eleanor home in another.

After that, even brief visits were discouraged by Grandmother
Hall. That fall, Elliott began slipping in and out of New York without
telling anyone, then moved there permanently, picking up his mail at
the Knickerbocker Club but actually living in a rented uptown house
under the name of Maxwell Eliot with only his valet and another
mistress, a Mrs. Evans, for company. 6 Though Eleanor's father now
lived less than three miles away, she saw him only rarely. He wrote
confused letters and telegrams to his brother and sisters, alternately
chiding them and asking forgiveness, then refusing to see them when
they responded. He once took Mrs. Evans with him to the Boone and
Crockett Club and had her sign the visitors' book as "Mrs. Maxwell

6. During the last months of his life, Elliott seems to have had two mistresses Mrs. Evans
in New York and his friend from Paris, Mrs. Sherman, who evidently spent the summer on the
Massachusetts coast in part to be near him. Mrs. Sherman kept up a correspondence about Elliott
with Corinne Robinson for some years. The Roosevelts would eventually provide a cash stipend
for Mrs. Evans, its sum increased after Mr. Evans appeared in the family lawyer's office waving
a loaded revolver.

Source: TR to Bamie, August 25, 1894; Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library,
Harvard.

286 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Eliot" an instance, his embarrassed brother told Bamie, of "the queer
low cunning which runs through Elliott's most insane or foolish mo
ments. A nice man, our brother."

Elliott was drinking from half a dozen bottles of alcohol each
morning, according to Theodore: anisette and brandy, champagne and
creme de menthe, anything that would blur his anxieties, ease the
mysterious frenzy that now made it impossible for him to sit still for
more than a few minutes at a time. In May he spent the night in a police
lockup, having been too drunk to pay his cabman or tell him where
he lived. In July he drove into a lamppost while drunk, was thrown
from his carriage, and injured his head. "Poor fellow!" Theodore
wrote. "If only he could have died instead of Anna!" There was
nothing anyone could do, he said. "He can't be helped, and he must
simply be let go his own gait."

On August 13, 1894, still suffering from the effects of his carriage
accident and confused by delirium tremens, Eleanor's father tried to
climb out an upper-story window of his house on 102nd Street, raced
hysterically up and down the stairs, fell back into a final shuddering
seizure, and lost consciousness.

He died the next day. Eleanor's aunts Maud and Pussie together
told her he was dead. She said, "I did want to see father once more,"
and cried herself to sleep that night. But in her heart she refused to
believe it. Her father had so often been away; surely he had not now
left her forever. "I finally went to sleep," she remembered, "and began
the next day living in my dream world as usual. . . . From that time
on I ... lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he
was alive."

A few years later, Eleanor wrote a composition in a little notebook
given to her by her Aunt Pussie. It shows how powerful the pull of
her father's memory was for her; how deep the sense of betrayal it left:

She had waited so long, so long. One night she awoke. Someone was
whispering in her ear. Suddenly the room seemed to be filled by millions
of shadowy forms who whispered to her, "He has broken his word. He
has broken his word." She could stand it no longer & she cried out in the
dark "Oh my father come" & a voice answered "I am here" & he stood
beside her & his cool hand lay on her hot head. She clasped it in both of
hers & sighed contentedly. "Oh I knew you must come" but he answered,
"I have kept my word I have come back I must go away again," & the

E is an Angel 287

child cried out "Oh! take me with you I have waited so long & it has been
so hard I cannot stay alone." He bent down and kissed her & she fell
asleep. The next morning the people who had never understood came in
& looked pityingly at her lying cold & dead & they said "poor child to
die so young (how sad)" & a few tears were shed & then she like all those
who have ceased to move in this earthly sphere sank into oblivion. 7

Through all his sad wanderings, Elliott Roosevelt had carried with
him the small leather-bound Bible from which he had once read to
Anna Hall. His daughter inherited it, and kept it always at her bedside.
Sometime during the final months of her own long life, seventy-seven
years old and staying at Val-Kill, the little house she and two friends
had built for themselves a mile or so east of Springwood, she showed
the battered testament to a young friend who was both a bibliophile
and an Episcopal priest and asked him how it might be repaired. The
binding had split; the pages had torn loose from the spine. He told her
where to go to have the work done, but she did not seem satisfied.
Something else was troubling her. She didn't know whether he was
aware of it, she said suddenly, but her father had died in circumstances
which, in strict religious terms, might not be thought morally correct.
"Do you think it's possible," she asked, "that because of that I won't
see him? Do you think it could be a bar to his being in heaven?"

The young priest did his best to reassure her. "/ couldn't keep him
out for that," he said, "and God must be much more generous than
I am or none of us stands a chance there."

She smiled. She would be reunited with her father at last. 8

7. A second essay recreates the moment when her father told her she could not come to live
with him after her mother died: "A child stood at a window watching a man walking down the
street, the little face was white and set & the big tears stood in the brown eyes but the mouth

smiled till the man was out of sight Her father [was] the only person in the world she loved.

Others called her hard & cold but to him she was everything lavishing on him all the quiet love

which the others could not understand He never knew what that smile cost ... a time came

when there were no more letters & a grown up person told the child that her Father was dead,
but the child did not cry. Dead people did not come back & her Father had promised to come
& she could not bear to hear him spoken of as dead but at last she grew accustomed to it, they
were making a mistake but what was the difference? The years went by & she still believed, but
doubts came sometimes now."

Source: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 729.

8. She never tired of talking about her father; never gave up trying to persuade friends and
family of his virtues or making small gestures in his memory. In 1930, she wrote to thank her
Aunt Corinne for having given a bed in her father's name to an old soldiers' home: "I always
do some little thing on his birthday which I think he would have liked to do. I remember so many
things he did when I was little, not only for me and they were always a little different from the
way other people did them!" Three years later, she published Hunting Big Game in the Eighties,
a collection of Elliott's letters "Edited by his Daughter Anna Eleanor Roosevelt," m part so that
his grandchildren could get some firsthand sense of his charm and vivacity. This Is My Story, the

288 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

The confused legacy of her parents marked Eleanor Roosevelt's
whole life. Her anger at her preoccupied mother was barely contained,
and Anna Roosevelt's early death had barred forever the sort of recon
ciliation between them that might have come about had Eleanor ever
understood her father's weaknesses, or seen that her mother's devotion
to her husband had been very nearly as powerful as her own; Anna,
too, had been desperate to hold fast. But as it was, Eleanor remembered
most her mother's severity and distance and that, in turn, equipped her
poorly for being a nurturing mother to her own children. 9

The impact of her father's memory was still more complicated. Her
idolization of him her wish to have even her grandchildren think of
him only as a "kind and loving and charming personality" was both
a source of great strength and of dangerous weakness. It left her
determined always to embody those qualities he urged most strongly
upon her "unselfishness, generosity, loving tenderness, and cheerful
ness." But there was in her, too, however deeply buried, great anger
at the man who broke so many promises, failed to come for her, finally
abandoned her through death. That anger helped distort her percep
tion of people, made her tend to exaggerate their virtues at first, and
to be inordinately disappointed later when, inevitably, they failed to
act as she had dreamed they would.

From the sad lives of both her parents she learned, too, that no one's

first volume of her autobiography, published four years later, is dedicated "to the memory of my
Father who fired a child's imagination."

After her mother died, Elliott had presented a big pulpit Bible to the Abingdon Episcopal
Church in her memory; when it was destroyed in a fire, Eleanor replaced it with another,
inscribed by her to both her parents.

In a letter to Corinne from India in 1881, Elliott had written a rhapsodic description of the
Taj Mahal by moonlight: "The huge white dome in the quiet soft shadows is ... breathlessly
beautiful [in] the intense quiet of an eastern night. The stars and moon casting it seems all their
light on this huge pearl of purity surrounded by the black shadows of the river. ... I have no
words for it all." And he had later promised Eleanor that he would one day take her to see it.
She visited India on her own in 1952 and insisted on taking time out from her usual frenzied
schedule to realize at least part of that old dream, sitting alone in the moonlight on the same
carved marble bench on which her young father had sat seventy years before. She had prepared
herself to be disappointed, a friend recalled, but she was not. The Taj Mahal was all Elliott
Roosevelt had said it was.

Sources: Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children, FDRL; Richmond Times Dis
patch, February 25, 1935; A. David Gurewitsch, Eleanor Roosevelt: Her Day, page 96.

9. The memories of Anna Roosevelt, Eleanor's daughter, seem an eerily faithful replication
of her mother's memories of Anna Hall. "She [Eleanor] felt a tremendous sense of duty to us,"
Anna said. "It was part of that duty to read to us and to hear our prayers before we went to bed,
but she did not understand or satisfy the need of a child for primary closeness to a parent."
Eleanor herself more or less agreed: "I was certainly not an ideal mother. It did not come
naturally to me to understand little children or to enjoy them. Playing with children was difficult
for me because play had not been an important part of my own childhood."

Source: Both quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 198.

E is an Angel 289

love for her was likely to last, that those upon whom she counted most
would let her down.

Eleanor spent the next five years with her Grandmother Hall, who
always seemed to her "a very old lady" though she was not, at least
in years. She had aged prematurely from having coped alone for so
long with the temperament and eccentricities of her troubled children:
not just poor Anna, but Pussie, who experienced a series of tempestu
ous but unsuccessful love affairs, and Eddie and Vallie, who each tried
business and marriage, eventually failed at both, and returned home to
live and drink. Grandmother Hall spent most of each day in her room,
coming downstairs only to greet her infrequent visitors, and to con
duct prayer services morning and evening "to which . . . every servant
and even the coachman was expected to come.' 7 She seemed "ex
hausted," Corinne Robinson Alsop wrote, and "when she had to take
[in] two forlorn little [grand] children, she was incapable of giving
them anything but a meagre, weary, left-over love."

That severely qualified love usually took the form of discipline.
Blaming herself for having failed to control her own offspring, she was
now determined to maintain a firm hold on her grandchildren. "We
were brought up on the principle that 'no' was easier to say than 'yes,' "
Eleanor remembered, and that sense of austere decorum pervaded the
house on West Thirty-seventh Street. Young Corinne Robinson was
fond of Eleanor, but never wanted to visit her there had to be "sent"
by her mother, she said because it was so grim. A single flickering
gas jet lit the narrow front hall. There was a dimly lit drawing room,
formal and uninviting, and a second still darker parlor, and beyond
that "a frigid looking dining room where we had our supper in solemn
silence as we were all affected by the unbroken gloom. There was no
place to play games."

Eleanor continued to attend Roser classes, held now not in her own
home but in that of one of her seven classmates. The curriculum was
haphazard. "Bits of poetry, dabs of Greek and Roman history, a very
superficial variety of English," Corinne remembered, "and nothing
else." And when Mr. Roser himself took the class, the teaching was
farcical. He wore always a Prince Albert coat, pulled importantly at
his side-whiskers while murmuring, "Young ladies, young ladies," and
was utterly without humor. "There is a distinction between reasonable
and unreasonable merriment," he often said when one of the girls
could not contain her laughter, and the distinction seemed to be that

290 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

the former did not exist. Eleanor was a sober, diligent student,
nonetheless, especially fond of poetry and of writing short stories
whose heroes and heroines were often lonely children who "yearned
most for love."

She also studied French and each week endured the fashionable
Dodsworth dancing classes. Corinne remembered them, too. The girls
left their coats and little fur-lined shoes downstairs, changed into danc
ing shoes, then climbed the stairs to the studio itself, where they
curtseyed to Mrs. Dodsworth, "whose hair had the stiffest ondule,
whose voice had the most liquid modulation, and whose person was
sheathed in a dress covered with spangles or embroidered with pearls.
. . . She sat at a painted Louis XIV desk with a register to mark our
attendance which she did with a fine pen, holding her little finger
slightly extended while she wrote." It was Mr. Dodsworth who
gravely explained the mysteries of the waltz and gavotte, two-step and
polka to the children. He was, Corinne wrote, "the impersonation of
elegance and etiquette coupled with a stinging sarcasm and discipline."

The Dodsworth classes were special agony for Eleanor. She was
tall for her age, shy and thin and awkward, and she was dressed oddly.
"My grandmother believed in keeping me young," she once explained,
and insisted that she wear "dresses that were above my knees when
most of the girls my size had them halfway down their legs." The other
girls would have laughed aloud had they not thought her so sad.

She preferred the summers she spent at Oak Terrace. Like Frank
lin, Eleanor continued to spend much of her childhood without the
companionship of children her own age. A school friend who lived just
five miles from Oak Terrace was allowed to visit her for just one day
each summer, and Eleanor was permitted to repay the visit, also for a
single day. Unlike Franklin, she had precious little compensatory at
tention or approval from the adults close to her, though her uncle
Vallie did show her how to jump her pony and she sometimes rowed
to town before breakfast with her Aunt Pussie to pick up the mail.

Her only companion most of the summer was Hall, six years
younger, for whom she tried to be more mother than sister, calling him
"the kid" and writing to him regularly whenever they were apart.
They climbed together around the third-floor gutters of the big house
and got caught, watched the laundress wash and iron their aunts'
voluminous petticoats, trapped tadpoles in the pond. But most of the
time Eleanor read, sitting beneath the big trees on the lawn or in the
attic or in a corner of the library, where she tried not to look too long

E is an Angel 291

at the turbulent Dore illustrations that both fascinated and frightened
her in her grandfather's massive Bible. She enjoyed the quiet at Tivoli
especially, because it allowed her to live without interruption in her
dream world "in which I was the heroine and my father the hero."
That dream sustained her day and night; she retreated into it content
edly whenever she was out walking, she remembered, "or when any
one bored me."

Yet Tivoli may also have been the scene of a still darker passage in
her stunted childhood. Madeleine, the French-speaking companion
her Great- Aunt Maggie had assigned to her in 1891, remained with her
daily for nearly seven years, while caring for Hall whom she much
preferred as well. Eleanor never liked her, was in fact "desperately
afraid of her" all that time, though she could never in later years
remember precisely why. She did recall that Madeleine was a demand
ing teacher. When Eleanor's darning did not suit her, she would take
scissors and snip it all out, leaving her pupil a big round hole to fill in
all over again. And she was rigid about the rules Grandmother Hall
laid down: no reading in bed before breakfast; no novels on Sundays;
to bed precisely on time each evening. When, as often happened,
Eleanor slid down the steep mossy roof of the ice house and smeared
her white drawers with green, she always "told my grandmother
before I went to Madeleine, knowing that both of them would scold
me, but that my grandmother would scold me less severely." She also
recalled that Madeleine "did not like to be disturbed in the evenings,
and yet she had to do my hair when I came to bed, and if I was a few
minutes late I not only got a scolding, but my hair was unmercifully
pulled."

Still, Eleanor sensed that had not been all of it. "Madeleine caused
me many tears," her former charge wrote, in what seems to have been
genuine bewilderment over the reasons for them, but "I have no
recollection of why she really frightened me." It was a mystery best
forgotten, she concluded. "How silly it all seems today, and how hard
to understand the workings of a child's mind!" But if she remembered
Madeleine's petty cruelties, what else was it that had been so terrible
that her conscious mind could not later summon it up? Had there been
more physical abuse than mere hair-pulling? Might there have been an
element of molestation in it, something that might help account for her
later deep ambivalence about sex? No one will ever know. But what
ever it was, it impelled her finally, at thirteen and on the edge of
adolescence, to tell her grandmother about it as they walked together

292 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

in the woods. She could not stop her own sobbing as she "confessed"
it, she remembered, and whatever it was, it compelled her grand
mother instantly to send Madeleine back to Mrs. Ludlow and replace
her with one of her own maids.

Contact with her father's ebullient clamorous family was sharply
curtailed, Grandmother Hall, who had always been a little scornful of
the Roosevelts for being "in trade," perhaps also believing that Elliott's
brother and sisters had somehow been partly to blame for her daugh
ter's tragedy, 10 Even visits with Eleanor's gentle, fond Auntie Gracie
were forbidden. She did manage at least one visit to her Uncle Ted's
boisterous clan at Sagamore Hill. The contrast with her own isolated
life could not have been more dramatic. There were as many as sixteen
cousins on hand. Uncle Ted greeted her with almost frightening en
thusiasm. "Eleanor, my darling Eleanor," he shouted, hugging her to
him with such vigor, his wife noted, "that he tore all the gathers out
of Eleanor's frock and both buttonholes out of her petticoat."

During the next day and a half, she tried her best to keep up with
the others as Uncle Ted led them on obstacle races or pellmell down
the same steep dune that had so impressed Franklin on his boyhood
visits, "desperately afraid/' she remembered, but resolutely not show
ing it.

Alice Roosevelt was her closest cousin in age but not in tempera
ment. She, too, had in a sense lost her parents her mother just hours
after her birth, her father when he remarried and had five more chil
dren. Her resentment of her stepmother was deep (and reciprocated),
and she responded to what she saw as her father's abandonment en
tirely differently from the way Eleanor had reacted to her own loss.
Alice became boisterous, self-dramatizing, a leader in boys' games
she took special pride in such unladylike feats as placing both feet
behind her head and apt at any moment to lash out in caustic anger.
Both girls were frightened of swimming and slow to learn. Each left
a record of the same sunny afternoon on the Oyster Bay waterfront
as Theodore sought to get them both accustomed to the water. Alice
stood weeping on the dock, she remembered. "I can see my father
shouting to me from the water, 'Dive, Alicy, dive.' " Although she
wanted to please him, he seemed "a sea monster to her" then, she said,

10. This evidently suited Uncle Ted's wife, Edith. "Anna's children are with Mrs. Hall, still
at Tivoli," she wrote shortly after Elliott's death. "I believe they are very well, but as you know
I never wished Alice to associate with Eleanor so shall not try to keep up any friendship between
them."

Source: Quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, page 25.

E is an Angel 293

"flailing away in the water, peering nearsightedly at me without
glasses and with his moustache glistening wet." She finally jumped in,
but before she did "I cried. I snarled. I hated."

Eleanor, whose own fear of the water had been born when the
Britannic seemed doomed, and was far greater than Alice's, did not
even protest. "She was always so fine about that sort of thing," Alice
said. She dove in to satisfy her uncle and sank right to the bottom.
When she finally came up gasping, another cousin playfully pushed
her under again. She had been "very much frightened," she wrote
later, and "never again would I go out of my depth." But no one was
allowed to know it; no one must ever see that "I was a good deal of
a physical coward." 11

"Poor little soul, she is very plain," her Aunt Edith wrote to Bamie
after this visit. "Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future. But the
ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan." Even that qualified opti
mism seemed unjustified that December, when Eleanor was permitted
to attend her Aunt Corinne's Christmas party. This annual event was
always "more pain than pleasure" to Eleanor because "the others all
knew each other very well and saw each other often." There was
coasting (which she only rarely dared attempt) and skating (at which
she was poor), and the climax was a formal dance to which she again
had to wear a short little girl's dress while all her contemporaries came
dressed as young ladies. Miserable on the sidelines, struggling to
stretch her dress as far down over her knees as she could, she watched
as Alice in her long gown danced with her handsome sixteen-year-old
cousin, Franklin Roosevelt of Hyde Park. When the music ended,

1 1. She did not dare even try to swim after that until 1922, when she was herself a mother,
her husband's illness had curtailed his own swimming, and she wanted to be able to watch over
her own children in safety as they swam. Diving took much longer until the summer of 1939,
in fact, when she was fifty-five years old and took lessons from Dorothy Dow, a junior member
of her White House staff. "Finally she could dive," Dow wrote that summer, "not only from
the side of the pool but from the diving board as well. She was anxious to perform for the
President, as he said he didn't believe she could do it. One day he drove over from the Big House
[Springwood] to Val-Kill [Eleanor's own nearby cottage], and sat at the edge of the pool. I sat
down on the grass beside him, and he said, 'I understand that you are the one who taught her
all this ' I acknowledged the fact. So, Mrs. R. walked out on the board, got all set in the proper
form and went in flat as could be. She could have been heard down at Poughkeepsie! I thought
the President would explode laughing, and his hand came down on my shoulder so hard 1 almost
fell over. Mrs. R. came up red in the face, with a really grim expression, said nothing, walked
out on the board again, and did a perfect dive. We all gave her a big hand, and she was pretty
proud of her accomplishment which she certainly should have been." She never learned to like
diving, but after that summer, whenever it was warm enough, she made a point of plunging into
her pool once a day because, she said, "it is good for my character."

Sources: Ruth K. McClure (editor), Eleanor Roosevelt, An Eager Spint: The Letters of Dorothy
Dow 1933-1945, page 104; Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: The Years Alone, page 173.

294 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Alice whispered in his ear. He looked toward Eleanor, squared his
shoulders, and came toward her. Would she care to dance with him?
She never forgot his gallantry.

At fifteen, Eleanor was again sent away, this time to finishing
school in England. But this exile was different from the others. The
three years she would spend at Allenswood, not far from London,
were "the happiest of my life."

We cannot be sure precisely why she was suddenly sent abroad. In
This Is My Story, Eleanor would write that her grandfather had felt that
the Hall household now had "too much gaiety for a girl of fifteen,"
her tactful way of saying that the unpredictability of Uncle Vallie's
behavior now that he was drinking steadily, and the emotional turmoil
that inevitably accompanied each of her Aunt Pussie's failed romances,
had been thought bad for her. Then, too, toward the end of her life,
Eleanor's mother had told friends that she greatly regretted her own
lack of "systematic knowledge" and hoped to do better by her chil
dren. Perhaps her grandmother's exhaustion played a part in the deci
sion as well. By sending one of her two grandchildren into someone
else's care, her own burdens would be eased at least a little.

Allenswood was chosen because Bamie Roosevelt Eleanor's be
loved "Auntie Bye" had attended its predecessor school in France.
Its headmistress, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, would become one of
the most important persons in Eleanor's life; only her father or,
rather, her child's memory of her father had more impact upon her.

A former pupil remembered her first sight of Mademoiselle Souves
tre some twenty years before Eleanor entered her school. Her face was
"rather broad," she wrote, "a low forehead, dark hair with a thread or
two of grey in it, parted in the middle, gently waving on the temples
and gathered up into a bunch of curls at the back of her head. A curious
kind of hairdressing which I have never seen except in pictures or
statues. The features were regular, clearly cut ... nose, lips and chin
fine and firm. The eyes were grey, sometimes clear and translucid,
sometimes dark, impenetrable, burning." She was now seventy, stout
and short, her head seemingly too large for her body. But her hair was
still drawn back in the classic manner (though it had turned entirely
white), and her gray eyes were still keenly interested in everything that
went on around her. They "looked through you," Eleanor remem
bered; "she always knew more than she was told."

E is an Angel 295

She looked kindly from the first upon the tall, slender, diffident
American girl who arrived at Allenswood in September of 1899 in the
company of her Aunt Tissie her mother's sister, now Mrs. Stanley
Mortimer and bringing with her all of her letters from her father in
a bundle tied with ribbon. Mademoiselle Souvestre may have been
predisposed to like her; she had been fond of Aunt Bamie, had known
both of Eleanor's dead parents, and had lost her own father at an early
age. And she must have been delighted to have a new student whose
French was so effortless; all conversations and all classes at Allenswood
were conducted in that language.

But it was more than that. Although Eleanor was not aware of it,
her grandmother and one or two of her aunts had written to Mademoi
selle Souvestre before she arrived, telling her of the child's troubled
past and expressing their worries for the future. She was a good girl,
they said, but fearful and sadly unattractive, sometimes untruthful
or, rather, afraid sometimes to tell the truth easily swayed by others,
subject to headaches and sleeplessness.

The headmistress absorbed all this, but sensed as well the reserves
of strength within her new pupil, strengths which her relatives had
overlooked in their remote solicitude and which she would now work
hard to bring out. There were some thirty-five girls at Allenswood; the
newcomer was assigned the place of honor across from Mademoiselle
Souvestre at the dining table.

To sit there, an earlier student remembered, "was an education in
itself." Mademoiselle Souvestre was witty, her speech darting "here
and there with the agility and grace of a hummingbird . . . No one was
safe, and if one laughed with her, one was liable the next minute to be
pierced oneself with a shaft of irony. . . . But her talk was not all
epigrams. One felt it informed by that infection of ardour, that enliven
ing zest, which were the secrets of her success as a schoolmistress.

There was nothing in which she could not infuse them The dullest

of her girls was stirred into some sort of life in her presence, to the
intelligent she communicated a Promethean fire which warmed and
coloured their whole lives."

But her interest in Eleanor went well beyond intellectual stimula
tion; that she provided to all her girls receptive enough to benefit by
it. Toward Eleanor she seems to have felt from the first a special sense
of affection and responsibility she herself characterized her feelings
toward her as "maternal" and in time she quietly saw to it that the

296 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

girl's outdated clothes were replaced by modish ones from Paris, and
even did her best to inculcate in her some of her own Gallic sense of
irony and amusement. 12

This marked the first time since her infancy that any adult had been
truly interested in Eleanor for herself. Her father's early and uncritical
affection and encouragement had given her a sense of her own worth
that everything that happened to her since had seemed calculated to
extinguish; Mademoiselle Souvestre rekindled it. The results could be
seen almost instantly.

Eleanor's life at Allenswood was in its way as Spartan and regi
mented as Franklin's had been at Groton. All the girls wore uniforms-
straw hats, striped school ties, shirtwaists, and long skirts; each girl was
permitted just three ten-minute baths a week; even bureau drawers were
opened and inspected for neatness; the heat in the old buildings was so
weak, Eleanor remembered, that "one had positively to sit on the radia
tor to feel any warmth," and many of the girls developed chilblains.

She did not. In fact she could not remember ever having been ill
at Allenswood, even for a day. She slept soundly, had no more head
aches. Everything about life at the school seemed to please her. At
Allenswood, she wrote later, "I felt that I was starting a new life, free
from all my former sins and traditions , . . this was the first time in all
my life that all my fears left me. If I lived up to the rules and told the
truth, there was nothing to fear."

Among the Halls and the fashionable young people she had known
in New York, where a premium was always placed on looks and
vivacity and convention, she had felt inadequate, lost. But at Allens
wood, where friendship, loyalty, and intellect took precedence, she
shone. Her three years there would teach her that there were ways in
which she could be a success.

She did well even at sports, and made the first field hockey team,
"one of the proudest moments of my life." 13 Unlike Endicott Peabody,

1 2. In this last effort she knew she had not entirely succeeded. After Eleanor left Allenswood,
Mademoiselle Souvestre often spoke of her with her younger cousin, Corinne Robinson. "Cbtre
Tottie, " she would say with obvious affection (using the pet name used by Eleanor's aunts), and
then, shrugging helplessly, "mais pas gate, pas gaie. "

A friend who knew Eleanor Roosevelt intimately during her last years recalled that "she
enjoyed humor and loved to laugh. But she never made a joke at least as far as I know."

Source: Corinne Robinson Alsop's unpublished memoir, Alsop papers, Houghton Library,
Harvard; interview with Edna Gurewitsch.

13. Characteristically, after reporting this triumph in her autobiography, she sought to
minimize it: "I realize now it would have been better to have devoted the time which I gave to
hockey to learning to play tennis, which would have been far more useful to me later on."

Source: This Is My Story, page 59.

E is an Angel 297

however, Mademoiselle Souvestre thought sports "more or less use
less." It was the intellectual and moral development of her girls that
interested her. They were to be trained to think and act on their own,
while maintaining at the same time "their grace, their freshness of
sentiment, and elegance which are the charm and smile of life."

There were other teachers at Allenswood, but, just as at Groton,
the school centered around its founder; only Mademoiselle Souvestre
really mattered. She taught history and literature and French in her
library, filled always with flowers, its walls lined with books and with
nudes by such artist friends as Rodin and Puvis de Chavannes which
startled some of the new students at first. The girls sat on small chairs
on either side of the fireplace in front of which the small determined
figure of the headmistress strode back and forth, punctuating her tor
rent of facts and opinions and asides with a pointer, and pausing now
and again to hurl a challenging question at her listeners. She made
them question every assumption they had brought to their lessons,
refused to allow them to parrot back to her her own opinions "Why
was your mind given you but to think things out for yourself?" and
when she found a girl's essay insufficiently thought through, she did
not hesitate to tear it in half in front of her classmates.

Her opinions were clear, crisp, and unconventional, the radical
legacy of her late father, the novelist and philosopher Emile Souvestre,
to whom she had been deeply attached. She favored trade unions,
believed Dreyfus innocent, and, although most of her pupils were
English, sided with the Boers in the South African war; during that
conflict, English girls were free to celebrate British victories in the
gymnasium, but while they did so she gathered around her in the
library the rest of the students American, Dutch, Swedish, Russian,
Latin American and lectured them on the rights of small nations to
follow their own independent paths. 14

Such opinions disturbed some of her students but fascinated Elea
nor, in whose home such things had rarely been discussed. Only

14. Her private life had been unconventional as well. She had founded Les Ruches, her first
school outside Paris, in partnership with another woman, who was also evidently her lover, and
it had closed its doors shortly after Bamie left it when the two women quarreled bitterly. An
agitated and highly colored account of life at Les Ruches and of the school's disintegration may
be found in a novel called Olivia, published in 1949 under a pseudonymn by Dorothy Strachey-
Bussy the biographer Lytton Strachey's sister, who had been a pupil in the French school and
later taught Eleanor English at Allenswood. There is no evidence that Eleanor knew of her
teacher's sexual preference. This should not be surprising. It was a determinedly reticent age,
and Mademoiselle Souvestre was an old and imperious lady when she and Eleanor knew one
another.

298 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Mademoiselle Souvestre's blunt atheism bothered her. Accustomed to
the grave, unexamined pieties of "my dear, religious grandmother,"
she found her teacher's sweeping scorn for every form of worship
somewhat alarming. Mademoiselle Souvestre, she wrote, "could not
comprehend a God who would think of bothering about such insignifi
cant things as human beings, and . . . religion which preached reward
for good behavior and punishment for bad she considered food for
small minds." Exposure to such heresies "did me no harm," Eleanor
would conclude many years later. "Mile Souvestre shocked me into
thinking, which was beneficial." But she did not adopt her teacher's
doctrines as her own. 15

She remembered most fondly the many evenings she spent in the
library listening eagerly as Mademoiselle Souvestre read poetry aloud.
Another rapt pupil recalled the extraordinary power of her reading:
"She read simply and rapidly, without any of the actor's arts and
affectations, with no swelling voice, with no gestures beyond the
occasional lifting of her hand in which she held a long ivory paper
cutter. But the gravity of her bearing and her voice transported me."
It transported Eleanor, too, and if the poems were those the headmis
tress especially liked, she remembered, "she read them over two or
three times, and then demanded that we recite them to her in turn."
Eleanor, who had long before delighted her father by reciting his
favorite verses to him, was especially good at this and found such
evenings "exhilarating." 16

During Easter vacation in 1901, Mademoiselle Souvestre took Elea
nor with her to Florence. For Eleanor, accustomed as she said only to
"regular trips from New York to Tivoli and back," travel with her
teacher was "a revelation." Mademoiselle Souvestre sometimes
changed her itinerary at the last possible moment something Elea
nor's grandmother would never have dreamed of doing. She always ate
local food and drank native wines (diluted with water for Eleanor) and
stayed in modest hotels and pensiones unused to foreigners. And she
shrewdly encouraged her young, still-timorous charge to accept re
sponsibility for herself, to explore life on her own. All the packing and

15. When Eleanor attended a Christmas midnight mass with Mademoiselle Souvestre at St.
Peter's in Rome in 1902, and the schoolmistress obviously enjoyed the music and candlelight,
Eleanor was greatly cheered. It was proof, she wrote much later, that "Mile Souvestre was not
an atheist at heart."

Source: This Is My Story, page 94.

1 6. Until the end of her own life, Eleanor Roosevelt loved to read or recite poetry to friends
and family in the evenings.

E is an Angel 299

unpacking was left to Eleanor; she was expected to see to tickets and
travel arrangements. When they reached Florence, Mademoiselle Sou-
vestre told her, "My dear, I should be exhausted if I walked the streets
with you, but the only way to know a city is ... to walk the streets.
Florence is worth it. Take your Baedeker and go and see it ... and we
shall discuss what you have seen. 7 ' Eleanor did as she was told, even
steeling herself to ask directions when she found herself lost in the
twisting old streets. "I spent hours in churches," she remembered. "In
the galleries I sat before certain pictures and barely glanced at others.
I can still see Botticelli's 'Spring,' with its riot of gay figures and
flowers. I loved the little Delia Robia babies that decorated both the
outside and inside of so many buildings; the statues in the square; the
old Ponte Vecchio lined with its funny little shops, where I prowled
looking for gold and silver work." 17

Each evening, back at their hotel, Eleanor would describe to Made
moiselle Souvestre all that she had experienced, prompting her teacher
to respond with rapid-fire discourses on art. Eleanor left no record of
these, but another pupil vividly conveyed the rush of her remarks after
her own initial visit to a museum. Everything was ostensibly said more
"to herself . . . than to me," the former student wrote. "What was the
common factor that made each of these pictures a work of art? Could
I tell her that? And how, with such material substances as canvas, oil,
pigments, were such immaterial effects produced? The plastic arts!
Had I ever thought how different they were from the other arts, from
literature, the art of words? From music, the purest or was it the
impurest of them all? . . . And so on, seeds flung at random into the
air, some to take roots, some, alas, to be lost forever."

Eleanor wrestled earnestly with these questions and remembered
always the impact upon her of great art experienced for the first time.
But more than that, she retained the memory of her first taste of
freedom, her first evidence that she could be effective and capable in
the real world. "Though I lost some of my self-confidence and ability
to look after myself in the early days of my marriage," she wrote, much

17. Evidently embarrassed by this evidence of an adolescent's understandable delight in her
own independence and pleasure in being able to acquire beautiful things, Eleanor added an
explanation when writing her autobiography: "As usual, gifts were on my mind; for when I did
go home ... I wanted to take some thing from my travels to everyone." A lengthy gift list survives
from her Allenswood days, including the names of friends, family members, teachers, even
Madeleine, the Alsatian nurse she had found so threatening. Already at sixteen, she was only able
to enjoy herself if persuaded that by doing so she was benefiting others.

Sources: This Is My Story, page 87; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 85.

300 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

later "when it was needed again later on it came back to me more easily
because of these trips with Mile Souvestre."

She held tight to those memories that summer when she returned
to America for the first time in two years. The voyage home provided
an abrupt reminder of the bitter reality of life with her own family.
Aunt Pussie acted as her chaperone. She was as usual swept up in a
new romance, this time with a young Englishman whom she had just
met in London and now had had to leave behind. She took to her berth
the moment she and Eleanor went aboard their ship, cried day and
night, and said she was tempted to jump overboard in her grief. Her
niece, with whom she shared the cabin, believed her and spent most
of the stormy crossing anxiously watching to make sure she did not
make good her threat.

Not long after they landed in New York, Eleanor and Pussie
visited relatives at Northeast Harbor, Maine, where one day Eleanor
evidently said something that enraged her excitable aunt. In her fury,
Pussie told Eleanor she was far too plain ever to have "the beaux that
the rest of the women in the family had had." And when that failed
to wound the seventeen-year-old deeply enough or at least when it
did not visibly shake her usual outward stoicism she lashed her fur
ther with lurid details of just what it was that had been wrong with
her dead father, just how his noisy disintegration had brought shame
to every member of the family.

Eleanor begged to be allowed to go back to Allenswood for one
more term. Mademoiselle Souvestre urged it, too. "I am sure another
year of a regular and studious life will be in every respect mentally and
physically beneficial," she wrote to Grandmother Hall. "Her health,
though excellent, is perhaps not yet settled enough to make it desirable
for her to face all the irregularities of a society life." Mrs. Hall wearily
agreed her own children's irregularities may have been all she
wanted to contend with that year provided Eleanor could find some
one else going to England who would be willing to escort her. It was
a measure of her granddaughter's new determination that she went on
her own to a New York employment agency and hired a "deaconess"
to accompany her on the voyage, an elderly churchwoman who looked
respectable enough to reassure the family.

She returned to Allenswood for her final term in triumph. Made
moiselle Souvestre was "very glad to see me," she noted. Her success
with her headmistress and with her other teachers was not entirely
surprising like Franklin, she had sought almost desperately to please

E is an Angel 301

adults all her young life but she was just as popular among her
schoolmates. Young Corinne Robinson, who entered Allenswood dur
ing Eleanor's last year, remembered that while everyone knew that her
older cousin was Mademoiselle Souvestre's "supreme favorite," she
had somehow "made no enemies through this favoritism." Eleanor was
"everything" to Allenswood, she said, "the most important person at
the school." Other former students also remembered that she was
somehow set apart "so much more intelligent than all the others,"
one wrote. Another thought her "much more grown up than we
were," and remembered that at Allenswood Eleanor already had "a
serious view of life, and once confided to me that all she wished for
was to do something useful: that was her main object."

Mademoiselle Souvestre made her a sort of unofficial member of the
staff, assigned to help slow learners keep up with their classmates and
to make newcomers feel at home. Younger girls especially admired her.
"Saturdays," Corinne remembered, "we were allowed a sortie into
Putney which had stores. Young girls have crushes, and you bought
violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were
idolizing." Eleanor's room was filled with violets every weekend. 18

Her teacher took her traveling again that year, to Rome at Christ
mas, to France, Belgium, and Germany at Easter, and seems to have
urged her to stay on still longer at Allenswood, even to think of making
a career of teaching. Eleanor had an insatiable appetite for knowledge,
and an instinctive talent and enthusiasm for imparting it to others. "I
have not found [her] easily influenced in anything that was not per
fectly straightforward and honest," she had told Grandmother Hall
early in Eleanor's time at Allenswood, "but I often found that she
influenced others in the right direction. She is full of sympathy for all

those who live with her As a pupil she is very satisfactory, but even

that is of small account when you compare it with the perfect quality
of her soul." For her to expend that energy and sympathy and talent

18. During her first term, Eleanor herself had evidently developed such a crush, on a brilliant
but tempestuous girl whom she called only "Jane" in her autobiography. Jane's vivid beauty and
uncontrollable tantrums must have been reminiscent of Aunt Pussie. She and Eleanor studied
history together with Mademoiselle Souvestre. "There were perhaps eight other girls in our
class," Eleanor remembered, "but as far as I was concerned there was no one but Jane." She was
thought a good influence on Jane, Eleanor wrote, "because I was quiet and docile," but there
was just so much she could do, and when her friend hurled an inkstand at the German teacher,
Mademoiselle Souvestre expelled her. Eleanor was "heartbroken," she remembered, but even her
tears could not persuade the headmistress to change her mind; Jane left the school. She and
Eleanor continued to correspond for several years, Eleanor wrote. Jane's "glamour," she said,
was unforgettable.

Source: This Is My Story, pages 62-63.

302 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

for leadership on making a place for herself in conventional New York
society seemed to Mademoiselle Souvestre a terrible waste.

Eleanor agreed in principle. Even before she had come to the
school she had written an essay entitled "Loyalty and Friendship,"
which had shown how little sympathy she had for the social whirl in
which her aunts spun with such enthusiasm. There were few real
friendships among women, she had written, because women were not
taught to value the quality of loyalty that alone makes true friendship
possible. "A woman will kiss her best friend one moment," she wrote,
u then when she is gone will sit down with another best friend & pick
the other's character to pieces.

"It may seem strange," she had continued, "but no matter how
plain a woman may be if truth & loyalty are stamped upon her face
all will be attracted to her & she will do good to all who come near
her & those who know her will always love her for they will feel her
loyal spirit, & have confidence in her while another woman will never
have anybody's confidence, simply because those around her feel her
lack of loyalty & by not having this great virtue she will lose one of
the greatest gifts that God has given man, the power of friendship."

Eleanor had demonstrated that power at Allenswood, had managed
to become the loyal, trusted friend of students and teachers alike; and
she would never entirely abandon her dream of becoming a teacher in
the tradition of the extraordinary woman who had changed her life. 19

But her immovable sense of duty would finally not permit her to
go against the wishes of her family. "To my Grandmother," she re
called, "the age of eighteen was the time that you 'came out'; not to
do so was 'unthinkable.' " She had to go home; it was time to enter the
adult world.

And, although she did not mention it in her autobiography, an
other impulse worked against her staying on in England. In her ab
sence, her young brother Hall had increasingly come under the care
of her erratic Aunt Pussie. Eleanor worried about the effect Pussie
might have on him; worried, too, perhaps that he might not forgive his
sister if she did not * return to him before too long. Better than most

19. Like her memories of her father, her recollections of Mademoiselle Souvestre were
uniformly admiring. That her teacher had shown genuine affection for her was all Eleanor
needed to know to love her without qualification. Corinne Robinson Alsop and others, though
also admiring, were more objective. The headmistress could be brutally impatient with slower
students, prized emotion and moral fervor above rational analysis, and sulked and slammed doors
when her tiny, worshipful assistant, Mademoiselle Samai, failed to answer her summons swiftly
enough.

Source: Lash, Love, Eleanor, pages 29-30.

E is an Angel 303

people, she knew the bitterness abandonment bred. She and Hall were
all that was left of their little family. They belonged to one another.
Neither could afford to lose the other.

In later years, Eleanor was not entirely uncritical of what she had
learned at Allenswood. It had failed to fill all the gaps left by her early
schooling under the fashionable Mr. Roser; there were whole fields of
inquiry in which she would never receive a solid grounding and had
to depend on what she called "the quickness of my mind to pick the
minds of other people and use their knowledge as my own." But the
time she spent with Mademoiselle Souvestre had forever changed her,
she wrote. "Whatever I have become since had its seeds in those three
years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality."

Her teacher felt just as strongly about her. Eleanor Roosevelt had
"the warmest heart I ever encountered," she told Grandmother Hall;
and when Eleanor returned to America in the summer of 1902, Made
moiselle Souvestre wrote to say that "I miss you every day of my life."

Eleanor spent most of her seventeenth summer at Tivoli, where
things had gone from bad to worse in her absence. Pussie was away
most of the time, living in New York, and her grandmother spent still
more time closed up in her bedroom. The reason was Vallie, whose
drinking now sometimes caused him to become violent, raging
through the house in search of someone to strike. A full-time keeper
was employed to keep him sober, but whenever he could elude him,
he liked to crouch in an upstairs window and fire his shotgun at anyone
who happened to be on the lawn. The neighbors no longer called;
Eleanor and eleven-year-old Hall learned to stay close to the trunks of
the big sheltering shade trees whenever they ventured outside. Eddie
was married now, but he too sometimes came home to carouse with
his older brother. Grandmother Hall was helpless to stop them. She
did permit Eleanor to invite one of her Allenswood friends home for
a weekend, but the strain of worrying over what her uncles might do
proved unbearable. She never again dared ask a girl friend to visit her
in the country. "It was not," she noted, "very good preparation for
being a gay and joyous debutante." 20

20. I was fortunate enough to visit Oak Terrace with members of the Roosevelt family on
the occasion of Eleanor Roosevelt's centennial in October of 1984. It is a derelict house now,
owned but only sporadically occupied by an Estonian religious sect whose members do their best
on weekends to keep it from further delapidation. Despite their earnest efforts, a porch recently
fell off; plywood covers the windows of Eleanor's third floor room, its rotten floor too weak to
support visitors; and a tangle of trees and bushes behind the house hides the river and covers the

304 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

There was at least one bright moment that summer. While she was
sitting in a railroad coach one morning on her way back to Tivoli from
a visit to New York, her Cousin Franklin stopped to speak to her. They
had not seen one another since they had danced together at her Aunt
Corinne's Christmas party three years earlier. They talked for a while,
Franklin swaying above her in the aisle he was soon to begin his third
year at Harvard then he escorted her into the next car, where she was
invited to sit with him and his mother. Sara Delano Roosevelt was very
beautiful and very imposing, Eleanor remembered, nearly as tall as she,
and swathed in black veils that hung from her hat to the floor. They
chatted pleasantly until they reached Hyde Park and Franklin helped
his mother from the train. Eleanor continued on to Tivoli.

That autumn, Eleanor and her grandmother escorted Hall to Gro-
ton, where he would spend the next six years. Grandmother Hall
would never again bother to visit him there. "Somehow or other,"
Eleanor wrote, "the real responsibility for this younger brother was
slipping from her hands into mine." She would write and visit him
faithfully throughout his school career, as that was "what all good
parents were expected to do."

Just as Anna Hall had been the mainstay of her turbulent family
in the brief period between her father's death and her own marriage
to Elliott Roosevelt, her daughter, not yet eighteen, was now becom
ing the stable, strong one upon whom the weak relied. She moved to
the city for the winter of her debut, sharing the dark house on Thirty-
seventh Street with Pussie, fourteen years her senior but still unmar
ried and engaged in simultaneous romances that frequently drove her
to stop eating, threaten suicide, and take to her bedroom for days at
a time. It was again left to Eleanor patiently to persuade her that life
was worth living. Vallie and Eddie visited sometimes, too, invariably
intent on what Eleanor called a "spree," and she found it necessary to
have triple locks installed on the inside of her bedroom door to bar
nocturnal visits from her restless, drunken uncles. But she also often
went out to find them when they did not return at night escorted
through the dark streets by her maid and she was sometimes able to
persuade one or both to come home to sleep it off.

lawn that once rolled smoothly down to the water's edge. After Grandmother Hall died in 1919,
Vallie lived on here alone until his own death in 1934, taking shots from time to time at the
neighbor's children, who liked to see how close to the house they could creep, and filling his days
breaking up gravel for the twisting, ungraded forest drive that still leads in from the road. Eleanor
dutifully looked in on him until the end.

E is an Angel 305

The effort took its toll. She visited her Aunt Corinne one weekend,
"burst into tears, and said, 'Auntie, I have no real home,' in such a
pathetic way," Corinne wrote, "that my heart simply ached for her."
Nonetheless, Eleanor remembered, "a certain kind of strength and
determination which underlay my timidity began to make itself felt
that year." For the rest of her life she would be expected to make the
arrangements so that others might live their lives more serenely. She
was rarely unequal to the task.

"This period," she also wrote, "was my first real contact with
anyone who had completely lost the power of self-control." All her life
the actions of anyone who seemed unable to control himself made her
withdraw. Her face froze in their presence, so did her emotions. The
ghastly memory of Vallie's lurching rages haunted her, and that haunt
ing would later be intensified when her brother, Hall, whom she had
worked so hard to make feel as if he belonged to somebody, showed
signs of the alcoholism that eventually killed him. But Vallie's excesses
had not been her "first real contact" with such things. They must have
stirred memories of her own father's dark side as well, however deeply
buried the half-heard nighttime quarrels between him and her
mother; the cloying reek of liquor that clung to him even during their
treasured visits together; the sight of him being carried senseless from
his club while she followed along as best she could at nine, holding his
three terriers on their leashes. 21

"Something locked me up," she once told a close friend; something
made spontaneity, emotional abandon, physical contact, difficult for
her all her life. She had every reason to fear what lack of control could
do to other people. But she must also have feared on some far deeper,
still more frightening level, that the potential for such behavior lived
within her as well. She had always to make sure she did not let anyone
know of its existence, must keep herself secured against it. There
developed within her, she wrote, an "exaggerated idea of the necessity
of keeping all one's desires under complete subjugation."

Eleanor was eighteen in October, and was to make her debut with
many other girls at the big Assembly Ball at the Waldorf in December.
It was a frightening event for "ninety-nine per cent of us," one of her

21. Having to care for troubled people was a burden she bore patiently but constantly
throughout her life. In the early autumn of 1962, already exhausted by the disease that would
soon kill her, she told a friend of a nightmare from which she had just awakened in which her
brother, Hall, and her turbulent son, Elliott, were "piled upon her" until it seemed she could
not breathe.

Source: Lash, A World of Lorn: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, 1943-1962, page 553.

306 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

peers remembered. "No, I would make that ninety-nine-point-nine per
cent." But Eleanor's fears were increased by her own conviction that
she would never be able to measure up to what a Hall or a Roosevelt
woman was supposed to be. Her own mother and aunts had been the
most beautiful debutantes in New York in each of their seasons; four
other Roosevelt girls, among them the glittering Alice (whose own
White House debut had so delighted Franklin), were to attend.

Eleanor was well dressed for the evening, she remembered her
Aunt Tissie had ordered a gown made for her in Paris "but there was
absolutely nothing about me to attract anybody's attention." She was
too tall, she thought, too serious; she danced badly, had lost touch with
her few old friends among the girls, and knew only two eligible men,
both much older than she: W. Forbes-Morgan, a perennial suitor of
Pussie's, and Robert Ferguson, an Englishman and former Rough
Rider who was an admirer of her Auntie Bye. "I do not think I quite
realized beforehand what utter agony it was going to be or I would
never have had the courage to go," she wrote. "Bob Ferguson intro
duced a number of his friends, Nick Biddle, Duncan Harris and Pen-
dleton Rogers. But by no stretch of the imagination could I fool myself
into thinking I was a popular debutante."

In this her distorted sense of her own unattractiveness warped the
record. Many years later, Duncan Harris, one of the young men she
met that evening and who dined and danced with her often that
winter, read the above passage in her autobiography and wrote her a
note from the Union Club to set the record straight: "I hasten to tell
you that you are far too modest about your appeal to the gilded youth
of 1902. Bob Ferguson, Nick Biddle and I were not doing heavy duty
at parties, and I remember well that when we asked you to dance it
was because we wanted to, and, contrary to your story, the spirit of
competition was distinctly present." By any objective standard, Elea
nor was in fact a successful debutante, invited to the all-important
Astor Ball and to the small exclusive dinners and theater parties that
were the true tests of popularity. Yet she never believed it. Her
mother's ghost and her Aunt Pussie's vivid presence presented a con
trast with her own looks and charm she could never imagine matching;
because she was such a disappointment to herself, she was certain she
had disappointed others.

She did not disappoint her Cousin Franklin. She intrigued him. He
had always liked her, telling his mother, after he had danced and talked
with her at the Robinsons' Christmas dance when Eleanor was just

E is an Angel 307

fourteen, that she "has a very good mind," and suggesting that same
season that she be invited to a Springwood house party that did not
finally come off. And her three years at Allenswood had made her still
more appealing. She was tall but womanly now, rather than rail-thin,
with her hair piled on top her head; an "interesting talker," according
to one of her frequent dance partners, "always gracious and pleasant"
and more substantive somehow than most of her fellow debutantes.
Shrewd hostesses seated her next to older guests because she could be
counted on make grown-up conversation, a practice she disliked but
could do nothing about.

Her name first appeared in Franklin's Line-A-Day diary on No
vember 17, 1902 just five weeks after he saw Alice Sohier off to
Europe. He attended the New York Horse Show at Madison Square
Garden that evening, and sat in Rosy's private box. Eleanor was there,
too, as the guest of her friend Helen Roosevelt Roosevelt and her new
fiance, Teddy Robinson, Aunt Corinne's son; and after the show, Rosy
took Eleanor and Franklin, Helen, and Mary Newbold to dinner at
Sherry's. Two weeks later, Franklin lunched with Eleanor and Helen
in New York, and two weeks after that, out shopping with his mother
just two days before Christmas, he managed to get Sara and her last-
minute packages back to the Renaissance Hotel by three-thirty so that
he could get away for tea with Eleanor.

They were together again for New Year's at the White House in
Washington, where they stood with the family and watched TR greet
thousands of well-wishers. They dined with him in the state dining
room, then attended the theater, where, Franklin noted happily, he
"sat near Eleanor. Very interesting day."

When Rosy gave a dinner for Franklin to mark his twenty-first
birthday on January 30, 1903 "very jolly!" the guest of honor noted
Eleanor was one of those who raised her glass with Sara to drink
"the dear boy's health."

Sara took her second apartment in Boston to be near Franklin that
winter, so that he found it difficult to find excuses to leave Harvard for
weekends in New York. He may have written to Eleanor over the next
few months, and she may have written back, but no such early letters
between them survive. 22 Eleanor once described the special strictures
under which even casual correspondence between single men and

22. Any account of the Roosevelt courtship is necessarily one-sided. Franklin carefully
hoarded Eleanor's love letters to him. She kept his, too, for many years but eventually destroyed
them all, probably in 1936 when she was at work on the first volume of her autobiography, This
Is My Story. What he wrote to her, then, must now be reconstructed from her responses to it.

308 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

women then had to be undertaken: "It was understood that no girl was
interested in a man or showed any liking for him until he had made
all the advances. You knew a man very well before you wrote or
received a letter from him , . . and to have signed one in any other way
than 'very sincerely yours' would have been not only a breach of good
manners but an admission of feeling which was entirely inadmissible."

Still, they managed to keep in touch, and Eleanor came to Spring-
wood for a four-day house party in late June, one of a party of six and
accompanied by her maid. It was a relatively quiet visit. A steady rain
kept everyone inside most of the time; they played blindman's buff,
dined at the Rogerses' chateau, and took one long walk in the dripping
woods. Three weeks later, she was back again with five other cousins.
The weather was better. There was a hayride along the Albany Road
for the group Sara called "my six young people," and a long stroll
along the cliffs overlooking the Hudson.

They all spent the hot afternoon of July 7 lying on the lawn, talking
quietly beneath the trees. Later, Franklin took his guests and Sara for
a dinner cruise on the Half Moon, gliding home on the broad, dark
river and gazing up at the lights of the great estates perched on the cliffs
above them. Franklin was "at his best" aboard his boat, Young Corinne
Robinson remembered "handsome at the tiller, a splendid sailor and
completely confident." He was evidently especially eager to make a
good impression that evening, for back in his boyhood room after the
others had gone to bed he noted in his diary that the whole day had
been "great fun." Then he added a new message in the private code
he knew his mother could not decipher: "E is AN ANGEL."

He was in love. We do not know how Eleanor felt about him then,
but Franklin was soon to leave on his trip to Europe with his Harvard
friend Charley Bradley, and before he put Eleanor aboard the train
back to New York he invited her to visit him and his mother at
Campobello just as soon as he got back. She agreed to come.

Whenever FDR was introduced to a newly engaged couple during
the presidential years, he always made a point of congratulating the
bride as well as the groom. Grace Tully, his White House secretary,
once asked him why. "He quickly explained," she wrote, "that he [had]
felt the need for it at the time of his engagement. . . . With the mock
sense of injury he sometimes affected, he said that when his engage
ment was announced, all the congratulations were showered on him
for securing Eleanor as a wife. He felt, he said, that some people at least
should have congratulated her for securing him as a husband."

E is an Angel 309

His sense of injury may not have been wholly feigned. Perhaps the
most frequently asked question about the Roosevelt courtship is just
what it was that so handsome and engaging a man as Franklin Roose
velt saw in his tall, sober cousin. But that question was rarely asked
when the Roosevelts were young. Eleanor was then the Roosevelt that
mattered, the niece of the President of the United States. In its chatty
coverage of the 1902 New York Horse Show at which Franklin and
Eleanor had shared Rosy's box, Town Topics carefully noted her pres
ence and ignored his. Franklin was an unimportant member of a
comparatively obscure branch of the family. Nor was he the only
young man interested in Eleanor; during their long and largely secret
courtship, Eleanor had tactfully to discourage several would-be suitors.

She was not a beauty a "belle," as Alice Sohier was, or her own
late mother had been, or her own aunts were but she was undeniably
attractive. Because she was both tall and slender, she was inevitably
described as "willowy"; was so described so often, in fact, that in the
second summer of her courtship she would take part in a tableau with
Franklin dressed as a willow tree. Her eyes were soft and blue, and he
especially admired her long gleaming blond hair. 23 The prominent
Roosevelt teeth which had so distressed her Aunt Edith (but which
neither she nor any other member of the family ever troubled to have
straightened) were less obvious when Eleanor was young than they
would one day become. And there was about her always an air of
serious intelligence, of genuine sympathy and interest, that encour
aged both men and women to confide in her, to reveal what she herself
once called their "heart's secrets."

Those qualities must have been a comfort to Franklin in the au
tumn of 1902. He began seeing Eleanor just weeks after he had stood
on the Boston wharf and watched Alice Sohier set off for New York
and the wider world beyond. Alice had proved more than a match for
him. Volatile, independent, and vividly aware of her own beauty and
desirability, she had eluded his charm, fended off his advances and
finally refused his offer of marriage. "She had flocks of beaux," a
member of her family remembered; "She was having too good a time
to be very serious about marriage." For all her youth, she had been
more self-assured at seventeen than he had been at twenty.

By contrast, the shyness and insecurity bred into Eleanor by her

23. Once during the presidential years, Frances Perkins noticed for the first time a portrait
of a youthful Eleanor that hung above the door of his White House study. FDR saw her studying
it. "The hair is just right, don't you think?" he asked. Then, fondly, "It looks just like her now."

Source: Quoted in Graff, Ginna, and Butterfield, FDR, page 191.

310 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

arid childhood must have held a special appeal for Franklin. Alice had
not wished or needed to be cared for, and Franklin's mother had
always sought to shelter him from unpleasantness of any kind. Eleanor
now provided him with the opportunity to provide some shelter of his
own. "He had always been so secure in every way," Eleanor once said
of their early years together, "... and then he discovered that I was
perfectly insecure." He took pleasure in the way his insouciant buoy
ancy helped calm her fears, and perhaps felt that Eleanor, unlike Alice,
could be counted upon to remain constant.

And there was still another bond that may have drawn Franklin to
her. Like him, she had spent much of her youth in the company of
adults and away from other children, and the result, according to a
close friend, was already a certain "aloofness from the careless ways of
youth." Eleanor shared what Sara once called Franklin's "kind of a
kinship with older people." She was able to fit with little effort into
his world, in which Sara and her friends and relations still played such
an important part.

She rejoined that world on September 28, 1903 just three days
after Franklin returned to Sara from his European vacation arriving
at Campobello with her maid for a five-day stay. There were picnics
and sailing expeditions Franklin at the helm, Eleanor steeling herself
against her old fear of the ocean and the seasickness that fear often
intensified. Sara always accompanied them, along with a full comple
ment of neighbors and their families and guests, and on Sunday morn
ing the three Roosevelts attended services together in the little board-
and-batten Anglican church at Welshpool. Franklin and Eleanor did
manage to attend one event without Sara, a "young dinner" at the
Pells', and on their last day together they took a carriage ride along the
northern edge of the island and later read aloud to one another from
Robert Louis Stevenson's Christmas Sermon before Sara and Franklin
took Eleanor in the Half Moon to her train at Eastport, Maine.

Sara evidently noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the attention
Franklin continued to pay to Eleanor. Perhaps her deep satisfaction at
having her son back at her side again had blinded her to what was
happening. And there was at least one other young woman on the
island of whose feelings for Franklin she may then have been more
wary: Evelyn Carter, a lovely and outgoing British girl, the daughter
of the British governor of Barbados and a guest of Sara's next-door
neighbor, Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, was clearly charmed by him. But Mrs.
Kuhn was shrewder than Sara, noting privately how much her boy
seemed to admire his quiet cousin.

Master Franklin on his tenth birthday, January 30, 1892.

Facing page: James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Jr., Franklin's troubled half-
nephew, "Taddy," rocks alone in his room at Rosy's "Red House," next
door to Springwood, in 1888. Above: Taddy restrains a family pet at his
father's home near Bicester, England, the following summer; his sister,
Helen, appears in the window and Franklin, visiting England with his
parents, stands at the right.

Rosy at the reins in 1886. His wife, Helen Astor Rooseveltjs at his side.
Their children, Taddy and Helen, sit behind them with their governess.

Franklin's parents in 1896, photographed by their son in the garden of
the Villa Britannia at Bad Nauheim during the family's fourth trip to
Germany in search of a cure for Mr. James' weakening heart.

Sara and Franklin, just home from his second year at Groton, on the
Springwood veranda in June, 1898.

Franklin as captain of the Groton baseball team, surrounded by his play
ers, 1899 (left), and silhouetted aboard the Half Moon off Campobello
later that same year.

Mr. James on "Bobby," the new saddle horse with which Sara surprised
him in 1899.

Franklin and his father and some of the Roosevelt dogs at Springwood
less than a month before the death of Mr. James in 1900.

Eleanor Roosevelt at four, and (facing page) her father, Elliott Roosevelt,
with some of the terriers that consoled him during his exile at Abingdon,
Virginia.

Alice Sohier (opposite) at seventeen, dressed for her presentation at court
in London in the spring of 1903. It was only after Alice left Boston for
her extended tour of Europe and the Near East that Franklin began to
court his cousin, Eleanor (above, center), shown here later that same
spring with two of the other young women whom Sara thought it sale
for her son to see: his cousin, Muriel Robbins (left), and his half-niece
Helen Roosevelt. Two weeks after this picture was taken at Hyde Fark
in June, Franklin confided to his diary that Eleanor was an angel.
( Photograph of Alice Sohier courtesy of Emily Shaw]

The announcement of their engagement still nearly three months off,
Franklin and Eleanor share a quiet moment on the porch of the Roose
velt home at Campobello in August of 1904.

E is an Angel 311

Eleanor stopped at Springwood for one night in early September,
on her way back to Tivoli from Groton, where she had left Hall for
his second term. They took a long drive together through the Roose
velt and Rogers woods. She told Franklin that she was worried about
her brother, whom she now called u the Cherub" or "the Kid," depend
ing on her mood. He was not doing as well as he might, was uncom
municative about how well he was fitting in. Franklin, in whom this
must have struck a responsive chord, promised to look in on him after
getting back to Cambridge. He, too, was anxious but about himself.
He was determined to make a success of his editorship of the Crimson,
he told Eleanor, and he was worried about the demands it would make
and was unable to decide whether enrolling in graduate school or law
school would allow him the most time for his newspaper duties.

Although he faced a hectic schedule upon his return to Cambridge
producing the first issue of the Crimson with only a skeleton staff,
ushering at a football game, deciding finally in favor of graduate
school, preparing remarks on journalism and the virtues of Cousin
Theodore's "strenuous life" for the incoming freshmen he did man
age to get to Groton on his very first weekend and reported to Eleanor
by letter that Hall was getting on well and seemed to have plenty of
friends. Along with his note, he evidently included a souvenir of their
time together at Campobello perhaps something as simple as a shell
or a sea-smoothed stone.

Eleanor responded gratefully from Rivoli on October 3 in the first
of her letters to him that has survived. She was grateful for the "token
from the sea," she said, though the requirements of courtship required
that she be a little embarrassed at accepting it: "I think you should have
sent [it] to someone else . . . don't you?" His good news about Hall
had relieved her mind, especially since "I can't tell much from his
letters."

Another note from Franklin told her of his decision to take gradu
ate courses. He was evidently unsure that he had done the right thing,
not convinced his studies would lead anywhere. Eleanor was pleased
for him. "You know quite well you need not apologize for writing
about yourself," she wrote. "I should think history and political econ
omy would be most interesting and much the most useful for you in
the future and of course you are going to get an A.M." She was already
eager to see him again. He and his mother had invited her to come back
to Hyde Park for the weekend of the sixteenth along with the usual
clutch of cousins, family friends, and Harvard classmates to see the
Harvard- West Point game at the Academy. Might he escort her back

312 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

to Tivoli, she asked, and stay the night on his way to Cambridge on
Sunday?

He was not able to arrange that, but the weekend went well any
way. Harvard won five to nothing, despite a steady rain that turned
the field into a bog, and on the way back to Springwood, Franklin and
Eleanor somehow managed to catch the train while his mother and the
rest of the party missed it, and so were able to have the half-hour train
ride home alone together alone, that is, except for Eleanor's maid.
Even this extended proximity apparently did not alarm Sara; she
merely noted in her journal that "we all got home on different trains."
Perhaps she was distracted by her continuing concern for Miss Clay,
Franklin's former tutor, still in her charge and now suffering such pain
that Sara did not dare leave her side for long. 24

Sara was only the most formidable obstacle to closeness between
Eleanor and Franklin. Eleanor herself once outlined a few of the
constraints under which Franklin then had to press his suit. u You
never allowed a man to give you a present except flowers or candy or
possibly a book," she wrote. "To receive a piece of jewelry from a man
to whom you were not engaged was a sign of being a fast woman, and
the idea that you permit any man to kiss you before you were engaged
to him never even crossed my mind." The couple could never truly
be alone together. Eleanor's maid served as a chaperone whenever a
relative was not available, even when Franklin took her for long drives
in the Roosevelt carriage.

Despite it all, their friendship was developing into a genuine ro
mance. Eleanor's letters were now signed "Your affectionate cousin,"
which in the decorous, infinitely shaded language in which courtship
was then conducted was a sure sign of growing intimacy, and when
she was invited to a house party at Ellerslie, the Rhinecliff estate of
former Vice President Levi P. Morton, she accepted, because, she told
Franklin, "I think I'll chance there being there someone I like." She
knew he was coming, too. He had done his best to throw his mother
off the track. "I don't remember whether I told you . . . that I have
accepted the Mortons' invite," he wrote home with elaborate casual-
ness. "Lyman [Delano] is going also." Sara was not told that Eleanor
would be among the guests, though she did eventually find out and
note the fact in her journal.

24. Miss Clay had evidently been misdiagnosed. She was in fact dying of cancer, and at her
own request Sara finally sent her home to England to die.
Source: SDR Journal, FDRL.

E is an Angel 3 1 3

Franklin evidently included a poem in one of his letters to Eleanor,
perhaps one he had written himself. Eleanor thought it "splendid," but
u what ideals you have to live up to! I like Tear nothing and be faithful
unto death,' but I must say I wonder how many of 'we poor mortals'
could live up to that."

On November 2 1 one week after the Morton house party, just a
day after Sara and Rosy had watched workmen place Scottish granite
above Mr. James's grave Eleanor traveled to Boston at Franklin's
invitation to attend the Harvard- Yale game. Aunt Kassie and her
daughter, Muriel Robbins, came along as chaperones. Franklin met
them at the train and they all spent the morning together, visiting an
art exhibition at the Boston Public Library and wandering over the
cobbled streets of Beacon Hill. That afternoon, Eleanor watched
Franklin in his crimson sweater as he led the futile cheers at the
stadium Yale won, sixteen to nothing and later he showed her and
Muriel his cluttered room at Westmorly Court.

Eleanor, Muriel, Aunt Kassie, and their maids moved on to Groton
that evening, where Eleanor now hoped to see for herself how Hall
was faring. Franklin followed the next morning, and that evening
described the day's events in his Line-A-Day diary. He had arrived
"just in time for church," he noted, and with Eleanor at his side
listened again to the deep familiar voice of the rector. "Lunch with
Aunt K's party" followed. And then, changing to the same code in
which he had first confessed his love for Eleanor, Franklin wrote:
"AFTER LUNCH i HAVE A NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN WALK TO THE RIVER
WITH MY DARLING." During that walk they somehow contrived to be
alone long enough for him to ask her to marry him, and for her to say
yes.

No one knows exactly what they said to one another, but many
years later, Eleanor confided to an intimate friend all that she remem
bered of it. Franklin had told her that "with your help" he would make
something of himself one day, she said, and she remembered replying,
"Why me? I am plain. I have little to bring you." The young couple
quietly returned to the family. They ate "supper with all the relatives,"
Franklin noted, and then he added another coded message: "i AM TO

GO TO NEW YORK NEXT SUNDAY."

But before he could keep that rendezvous he would travel to
Thanksgiving at Fairhaven and tell his mother of his plans.

CHAPTER

KEEPING THE NAME
IN THE FAMILY

What Franklin and Eleanor said to one another that autumn afternoon
on the bank of the Nashua is perhaps less important than why they said
it. For whatever Sara's complex motives were for seeking to discourage
her son from marrying, she was undeniably right that he and Eleanor
were very young to be considering such a step. Why were they in such
a hurry?

Franklin's love for Eleanor was genuine; there can have been little
conscious calculation in the feelings of the smitten young man who
called her "an angel" and "my darling" in his diary and in a code only
he could decipher. And he was accustomed to having whatever he
wanted; from infancy on, few desires had been denied him for long.

Still, other factors may have added to his urgency that had less to
do with love. Franklin was not the first Roosevelt who had hoped to
link the Hyde Park and Oyster Bay branches of the family. His own
father had once proposed marriage to Bamie; Bamie had once hoped
to marry Rosy; Rosy's daughter, Helen, was now engaged to Teddy
Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt's son. But in his case there was a further
compelling incentive. His connection with Theodore Roosevelt had
always been both a source of pride and frustration for him. At Groton
and at Harvard he had been known always as a Roosevelt, but could
never claim to be one of the Roosevelts. They came and went at will
at the White House and at Sagamore Hill; he visited there, too, from
time to time, but he had always to wait to be invited first. His sense

Keeping the Name in the Family 315

of precisely how others regarded him was every bit as acute as his skill
at pretending it did not matter; he must have known that most of his
Oyster Bay relations were at least faintly scornful of him. He was an
amiable enough guest, they thought, but "superficial," "without con
victions," "terribly self-conscious." They made fun of his narrow
shoulders and slight build. Franklin now stood six feet one and
weighed 161 !/2 pounds, Sara noted in her 1904 journal, "in silk pajamas
and barefoot." They laughed at his overeagerness and called him "Miss
Nancy" behind his back whenever he tried to play tennis; and he was
thought entirely under the control of his mother.

By marrying Eleanor, whom TR himself had called "my favorite
niece," Franklin hoped to gain the instant access to the presidential
family that distant kinship had always denied him. His love for Eleanor
was real, but her closeness to the immediate family of the man he
admired most on earth must have been an important part of her dowry.

The same slowness to mature which helped make his cousins so
underestimate him may have also added to his determination to marry
soon in another way. Franklin had always lagged behind his contem
poraries: his bigger, faster, more experienced schoolmates had rou
tinely outplayed him at sports no matter how hard he tried, and when
he had attempted to charm his way into the most exclusive circles
among his schoolmates he had been rebuffed. These defeats bred in
him anger and resentment perhaps even a desire to get even which
he mostly managed to disguise. But they had bewildered him as well,
and made him distrust taking further part in the sort of direct and open
competition with his peers that might result in still more humiliation,

Alice Sohier's decision not to marry him may have had a similar
impact. No contest was more open and direct than sexual competition;
none held more potential for the kind of embarassment he hated most.
Franklin's interest in girls had grown slowly, too, perhaps in part
because of his closeness to his mother. Sexual desire itself may even at
first have seemed to him as it evidently did to her a betrayal of her
love and devotion. Sara's apparently sincere belief that Franklin had
never been a "ladies' man" may have been in part proof of her inability
to see things she did not wish to see and of her son's skill at keeping
hidden from her whole areas of his life. Certainly he loved the com
pany of women with whom he never felt the need to compete as he
did with men and he delighted in harmless flirtation, in teasing and
flattery and dinner-table gossip, to the end of his life.

But if he did not compete with women, he knew he was expected

316 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

to compete for them, and he may well have wished to run no more
races he was not reasonably sure of winning. His early, over-eager
courtship of Alice Sohier, now in Europe but soon to return and to
be surrounded by suitors, had shown him that victory could be elusive,
that in trying to win a girl of great beauty and vivacity he was likely
to face a field of dangerous rivals. Now, by marrying his quiet cousin,
he need never run again.

Finally, marriage meant increased distance from his mother. His
earlier efforts to extricate himself from her incessant care his voyage
to Europe with his classmate rather than with her, his disinclination
to stay at her side when she took an apartment in Boston, his deter
mined secrecy had pained her and may have distressed him. Marriage
represented a legitimate way in which to justify to his mother (and to
himself) the greater freedom he needed if he was to build an adult life
of his own. That he had discussed it with Alice Sohier when just
twenty shows how determined he was to get away. For all his solemn
assurances to Sara that his marriage would alter nothing between them,
that the addition of Eleanor to their family would only enrich his
mother's life, he must have known that it would inevitably loosen the
ties that bound them to one another. Certainly Sara knew it, and
because she did, fought against it all the harder. And so, while for
Franklin's classmates marriage meant an end to the freedom of bache
lorhood, it would be for Franklin a declaration of at least partial inde
pendence. 1

Eleanor herself once tried to explain her own eagerness to marry.
"I had a great curiosity about life and a desire to participate in every
experience that might be the lot of woman. There seemed to me to be
a necessity for hurry; without rhyme or reason I felt the urge to be a
part of the stream of life and so [Franklin's proposal] seemed an entirely
natural thing, and I never even thought that we were rather young and
inexperienced."

Eleanor found Franklin enormously attractive, 2 but his interest in

1. One member of the Sagamore Hill family has suggested to me an additional and eminently
practical attraction feleanor may have had for Franklin. Most of his inheritance from his father
was controlled by his mother, who showed no sign of relinquishing it. Eleanor had an annual
income of between $5,000 and $8,000, sums which, especially in those days, her relative told me,
were much "better than a sharp stick in the eye.". Still, Franklin might well have married a far
wealthier woman, just as his half brother had; there were many of them in his circle. Eleanor's
fortune was a comforting but not a crucial factor in his decision.

Sources: Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, page 204; confidential interview.

2. In her autobiography, Eleanor wrote that when she told her grandmother of Franklin's

Keeping the Name in the Family 317

her also seemed inexplicable to her at first and she had been uncertain
of his intentions. She found it hard to credit the intensity of his feeling
for her and worried that she would inevitably prove a disappointment
to him. But he had laid patient, peristent siege, and the very qualities
in him that put off her cousins his reliance on charm, his almost
dandyish air, his genial gregariousness may have helped pull her to
him, for they echoed the charges her family had always leveled against
her father. It seems clear that Franklin and Elliott Roosevelt had some
how merged on some level of her mind. Her love letters to Franklin
were often signed "Little Nell," just as her letters to her father had
been long before; and she often called him "boy, dear" and "boy,
darling," the pet names Elliott's Aunt Ella Bulloch had used for him.
As a small child she had been unable effectively to defend Elliott
Roosevelt except in her dreams. Now, as a young woman, she could
stand beside Franklin, could lavish on him all the "quiet love" she had
once invested in her father. And by that devotion she would bring out
all that was best in him; she would be useful, and hence dared hope
that she might really be loved in return.

Marriage to Franklin also offered Eleanor the same bright hope of
escape from unwanted competition that marriage to her seemed likely
to provide for him. Shortly after she left Allenswood, Mademoiselle
Souvestre had written to warn her against being drawn too deeply into
the "turmoil" of society. "Give some of your energy, but not all, to
worldly pleasures which are going to beckon to you," she wrote, "[but]
bear in mind that there are more quiet and enjoyable joys than to be
among the most sought-after women at a ball." She knew her favorite
pupil well. Eleanor later wrote that her first New York season, "when
my sole object in life was society," had nearly brought her to "a state
of nervous collapse." She never fully overcame her fear of being found
inadequate by society, but a secret engagement to Franklin would at
least offer her the comforting private assurance that things for her were
already settled, that over the coming year she need only pretend to
compete.

With nothing much to do but dream of Franklin and fret over the

proposal, Mrs. Hall "asked me if I was sure I was really in love. I solemnly answered 'Yes,' and
yet I know now that it was years later before I understood what being in love was or what loving
really meant." Her qualifying remarks were written in 1936, with the full and bitter knowledge
of all that had gone wrong between her and her husband in the intervening years. It seems clear
from her many letters to her fiance that the answer she gave to her grandmother in 1903 was
not only solemn but heartfelt.

Source: This Is My Story, page 111.

318 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

demands made upon her by a society about which she did not frankly
care, Eleanor found some new satisfaction in social work. Her relatives
had always thought charity work worthwhile for a young woman,
provided it was kept in its proper place. "You were kind to the poor,"
Eleanor wrote of the lessons they had taught her. "You did not neglect
your philanthropic duties . . . you assisted the hospitals and did some
thing for the needy." As a very small girl she had helped her father
serve up Thanksgiving dinner to the newsboys in whom her grandfa
ther had taken an interest, and her Aunt Grade had escorted her
through the wards of another favorite Roosevelt charity, the New
York Orthopaedic Hospital, its wards filled with pitiable immobilized
children. The Halls, too, had sometimes made gestures toward the
unfortunate. Aunts Pussie and Maude had taken Eleanor with them to
a Bowery mission to sing carols to the derelicts at Christmas. Uncle
Vallie had once gone with her to Hell's Kitchen to trim a Christmas
tree though Eleanor later suspected that "some of his interest in good
works was because a lady he thought very charming was also interested
in them." And shortly after the death of Eleanor's mother, an anony
mous friend had written to a New York newspaper to remind readers
of Anna Hall's kindness; once, the writer said, he or she had personally
seen Anna stop her coach on a city street to offer an aged and badly
crippled woman a ride even though the sufferer had been "an entire
stranger."

Eleanor had something more substantial and consistent in mind. As
a debutante, her name was automatically inscribed as an associate
member of the Junior League. Most young society women left it at
that. Eleanor became an active and enthusiastic volunteer. She had no
practical grounding in social work, but neither did her young col
leagues. "We were just a group of girls anxious to do something
helpful in the city in which we lived," she once said of herself and her
fellow volunteers. But she had the shining example of Mademoiselle
Souvestre to remind her of the rewards of teaching, and she always
found it easiest to define herself through what she could do for others.

She and Jean Reid, the daughter of Sara's friend Mrs. Whitelaw
Reid, were assigned to the Rivington Street Settlement House two
blocks south of Houston Street on the Lower East Side. Jean played
the piano; Eleanor taught calisthenics and "fancy dancing" to a class
room filled with immigrant children, mostly Jewish and Italian. "The
children interested me enormously," she wrote years later. "I still
remember the glow of pride that ran through me when one of the little

Keeping the Name in the Family 3 19

girls said her father wanted me to come home with her, as he wanted
to give me something because she enjoyed her classes so much. I did
not go, of course/' At her own parents' insistence, Jean Reid drove to
and from the settlement in the family carriage. Eleanor took public
transportation, trying not to look frightened when drunks staggered
out of the saloon on the corner where she waited for her streetcar. And
she let little interfere with her duties; once when her class conflicted
with preparations for a party to which her family was sure she should
go, Eleanor went to Rivington Street instead, greatly annoying her
Cousin Susie Parish, who thought her "obstinate."

Her classes were "the nicest part of the day," she told Franklin, and
he was not to laugh at her about her work; if he had been living near
her in New York, she might not have volunteered, she said, yet "one
must do something, or not having the person who is all the world to
me would be unendurable." But she was not really just marking time,
for even when Franklin was in the city she met her classes. She allowed
him to come down and escort her home one afternoon, and was
embarrassed the next day when her girls crowded around her to ask
if the smiling handsome young man who had come for her was her
"feller" an expression, she later said, "which meant nothing to me at
the time."

Another afternoon, Franklin arrived at Rivington Street to find
that one of the girls had suddenly fallen ill. He helped Eleanor take her
home. Franklin himself had taught poor boys at the St. Andrews Boys
Club in what he had proudly told his mother was "one of the poorest
quarters of Boston," and he had at least once lectured on the birds of
the Hudson Valley to slum children as a favor to his old Campobello
friend Frances Pell. But nothing in his life had prepared him for what
he experienced as he carried the ailing girl up the narrow tenement
stairs that led to her parents' apartment the long greasy unlit hallway,
the sour trapped smells of cooking and bad plumbing, the incessant
noise. Back on the street he could not get over what he had seen and
smelled. "My God," he told Eleanor. "I didn't know anyone lived like
that." 3

It is interesting to speculate as to whether Eleanor would have been

3. Many years later, Eleanor would see Franklin's visits to Rivington Street as having been
an important part of his preparation for public life. She had often deliberately arranged to have
him pick her up there rather than at the Parishes', she told a friend over lunch at Val-Kill in 1961,
because "I wanted him to see bow people lived. " Then, leaning forward and smiling at the
memory, "And it worked. He saw how people lived, and he never forgot."

Source: Interview with Mary D. Keyserling

320 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

so easily persuaded to marry Franklin had she begun her settlement
work before he began to court her. (Later in her life, she would return
enthusiastically to social work and to teaching, in part at least to
rekindle some of the self-respect that her marriage ultimately failed to
foster.) Still, Eleanor was just nineteen in the autumn of 1903, in love
with her cousin, persuaded she could be of help to him, and infused
with the then near-universal conviction that the duty of every young
woman was to marry and have a family.

And in a curious way the closeness between Franklin and his
mother the sense of family unity that they conveyed whenever they
were together may have provided Eleanor with an additional impe
tus toward marriage. Her own family had been tumultuous, unreliable,
only sporadically concerned about her. "Who did she have?" her
cousin Corinne once asked, and then answered her own question:
"Nobody." Grandmother Hall closed her New York town house that
fall. Aunt Pussie moved in with Mrs. Ludlow on East Seventy-sixth
Street. Mrs. Ludlow's daughter Susan Parish and her husband, Henry,
took Eleanor into their adjoining home. Cousin Henry was tall and
thin and soft-spoken, and he took enough interest in Eleanor to show
her how to balance her checkbook and keep up with her bills. Cousin
Susie was something else again, a big determined, infinitely proper
woman members of the family compared her to "a full-rigged ship"
who frowned on too much mail from Franklin and made it clear to
her boarder from the first that she "might occasionally have guests for
tea down in a little reception room," but she could not invite anyone
casually for meals. Eleanor once wrote generously that her cousins had
been "more than kind" to her while she lived in their house, but in fact
in the fall and winter of 1903 she was as rootless as she had ever been,
without a real home or anything like a real family of her own.

Sara Delano Roosevelt may have represented many things to the
shy young woman who had fallen in love with her son, but among
them must surely have been stability and strength. To a young woman
whose own mother had been dutiful and distracted rather than loving,
and then had died young, Sara's singular love for Franklin must have
seemed something like a luxury, to be envied and perhaps even shared.
Eleanor meant it when she told Sara in her first letter after the secret
of her engagement had been broken that she hoped Sara would "learn
to love me a little." 4

4. Franklin's decision to tell his mother of his engagement at Thanksgiving may have been
made on the spur of the moment, for he evidently told Eleanor at Groton he planned to tell Sara

Keeping the Name in the Family 321

Sara's love was not won easily. She had expressed her reservations
about the engagement to Eleanor and Franklin during a long talk at
the Hotel Renaissance on December first, and had exacted their prom
ise to keep the secret for a year while remaining apart to test the depth
of their commitment. Eleanor, whose instinct like Franklin's was
whenever possible to try to please her elders, tried hard to understand
Sara's complicated emotions. She did inform Grandmother Hall of her
plans, and when her grandmother told her that her first priority was
not to hurt Sara's feelings, she agreed. "I realize more and more how
hard it is for her," she wrote to Franklin as soon as he got back to
Cambridge, "& we must both try always to make her happy. She is
coming to town today for a few days & says she will telephone & try
to see me."

She did just that three days later and invited Eleanor to come
shopping with her. She had a few more things she wanted to talk over.
Eleanor reported them to Franklin in a long anxious letter that eve
ning. He had been planning to spend the following weekend in New
York, but Sara now insisted that he come for Saturday only, Eleanor
wrote; he and Eleanor were to lunch and dine with her, and he was
then to accompany Sara home to Springwood on Sunday morning.
"Helen and Cousin Rosie have been asking when you were coming
home," Eleanor wrote. "She [Sara] thinks they are sure to hear you are
in New York & say you are loafing & never coming home & she also
says if we all go to church together we are sure to be seen. She also
thinks that you ought to go home on account of the place, & your
interest in it. She asked me to write you & I tell you all this because
I think it only fair. Of course it will be a terrible disappointment to
me not to have you on Sunday as I have been looking forward to it
& every moment with you is very precious as we have so little of each
other, but I don't want you to stay if you feel it is your duty to go up
& I shall understand, of course. . . . Whatever you do I shall know to
be right but I don't quite think your Mother quite realizes what a very
hard thing she was asking me to do for I am hungry for every moment
of your time."

Sara had made a still more ominous suggestion during their talk.

he was coming to New York the following Sunday only to see George Marvin, a young English
master at Groton who had become his friend. Characteristically, Eleanor had frowned upon that
sort of subterfuge: "Please don't tell your mother you have come down to see Mr. Marvin on
Sunday, because I never want her to feel that she has been deceived & if you have^to tell her
I would rather you said you were coming to see me for she need not know why. Don't be angry
with me Franklin for saying this, & of course you must do as you think best."

322 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

She planned to take another house in Boston for three months that
winter, Eleanor reported. "She said she hoped I would come & stay
once or twice during that time but if she took the house she did not
want you to be coming to New York. I can understand how she feels,
but I'm afraid I can't promise not to want you more than twice in all
that time." Eleanor would abide by his decision about that, too, she
said, but, "Oh! boy dear, I want you so much. I'm worried & tired &
cross & I don't know what I ought to do."

Sara wrote Franklin that same evening from the Renaissance, mak
ing no mention of her plan to rent a Boston house but reiterating the
arguments she had asked Eleanor to make. She thought she and Elea
nor had had "a nice talk," she said. "I have thought constantly of you
& your hopes my dear boy, & I feel that in gaining Eleanor's love you
are very fortunate for I have always felt that she is a true loyal nature
& even though I have not known her very long really well, I feel very
sure of her. Already I am getting over the strangeness of it & though
I could have wished it were all to come a little later, it may be all for
the best. Now I can't bear to disappoint you even a little, but you will
judge & act as you think best. I think that next week when you will
be with her all day & evening Saturday, it would be well for you to
come home Sunday morning for the day. . . . Rosy and Helen will be
there. They have both asked me when you w'd be home for a Sunday.
Were you in town both days you could not fail to be talked about for
every reason. ... I shall come down next Friday & you will find me
here Saturday morning. You will breakfast with me & I am asking Mrs.
Parish & Eleanor to lunch here, & Eleanor will dine here, it is a quiet
place & no one can talk."

Sara had plans for his Christmas holidays, too. She wanted him to
accept u any nice dinners or parties you are asked to ... in New York,
keeping of course the 24th and 25th for Hyde Park. I know you will not
want to, as Eleanor will be at Tivoli, but you must be patient & keep up
your interest in home things & in making friends here [in New York] &
please don't think I am unsympathetic & that I do not understand you
for I do, & I know exactly what you really would prefer doing."

Armed with both versions of the talk between Eleanor and his
mother, Franklin drafted a reply to Sara in which he displayed clear
signs of the masterful tactician he would one day become. Since Sara
had said nothing to him about her plans for renting a Boston apartment
he saw no need to confront that issue until he could talk to her in
person. Meanwhile, he played up every point in Sara's letter on which

Keeping the Name in the Family 323

he and she could be made to seem to agree, and deflected or undercut
rather than contradicted every argument she had made against his plan.

Dearest Mama,

Yours of Friday came yesterday & I have been thinking over what
you say about next Sunday I am so glad, dear Mummy, that you are
getting over the strangeness of it all I knew you would, and that you
couldn't help feeling that not only I but you also are the luckiest & will
always be the happiest people in gaining anyone like E. to love and be
loved by.

I confess that I think it would be poor policy for me to go to Hyde
Park next Sunday although, as you know and don't have to be told, I
always love & try to be there all I can I have been home twice already
this term & I feel certain that J.R.R. and Helen w'd be sure to smell a rat
if I went back for part of a day just a week before the holidays, for they
would know I had been in N.Y. a whole day. Also, if I am in N.Y. on
Sunday not a soul need know I have been there at all as if we go to church
at all we can go to any old one at about 100th St. & the rest of the day
w'd be in the house where none c'd see us. Of course I suppose you have
told no one you w'd see me Saturday. Now if you really can't see the way
clear to my staying in N.Y., of course I will go to H.P. with you but
you know how I feel and also I think that E. will be terribly disap
pointed, as I will, if we can't have one of our first Sundays together It
seems a little hard & unnecessary on us both & I shall see you all day
Saturday which I shouldn't have done had the great event not happened.

Franklin did agree to "accept all invites for Xmas. . . . Indeed, I
don't intend to give up things It w'd not be right to you or E.
. . . You can imagine how happy I am It gives a stimulous to
everything I do." But he hoped they could have a Christmas house
party at Springwood, too; the usual crowd of friends and classmates
and relatives including Eleanor, of course.

As usual, Franklin had managed to seem reasonable, affectionate,
good-humored, and solicitous of his mother's feelings, but he had not
budged an inch, would be denied nothing. He would spend Saturday
and Sunday with Eleanor, and he would see her over the holidays as
well. Sara had been outmaneuvered. She still thought Franklin was
making a mistake, she told him. "Of course you are sure to be seen in
New York & the Parish servants will talk. ... I am so glad to think
of my precious son so perfectly happy. You know that I try not to think
of myself. I know that in the future I shall be glad & I shall love Eleanor

324 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

& adopt her fully when the right time comes. Only have patience, dear
Franklin, don't let this new happiness make you lose interest in work
or home. I want so much to talk many things over with you & try to
look ahead a little & plan." But she could not change his mind and
dutifully began to draw up a guest list for the Christmas house party.

The next day was the third anniversary of the death of Mr. James.
She and Franklin had spent the previous anniversary together at
Springwood and in the afternoon had driven up to the cemetery with
a wreath. December eighth fell mid-week in 1903, so that there had
never been any possibility that Franklin could leave campus and his
classes to be present on the sad day itself. But now, by refusing to come
to Hyde Park until nearly two weeks after the anniversary in order to
see Eleanor, he was leaving his mother alone with her memories. She
wrote again to Franklin that evening, her resentment evident beneath
the customarily serene surface of her note: "I have been up to the
church with flowers & found Brother Rosy had been there with a huge
bunch of roses & carnations on his way to his train. It looked so lovely,
the big lower stone in place & all covered with snow, then my wreath
& our flowers."

For Eleanor, at least, the struggle over the weekend had been
worthwhile. "We have had two happy days together," she wrote
Franklin after he had returned to Cambridge, "and you know how
grateful I am for every moment which I have with you." She signed
this letter, "Your devoted Little Nell."

"I am sorry to part with the old year," she wrote to Franklin on New
Year's Eve; "it has been so good to me but the new is going to bring
us both I hope still more perfect joy and love, if that is possible. Twelve
is striking, so goodnight darling 'a Happy New Year to you .' "

Franklin was running flat-out now, overseeing the Crimson, seeing
Eleanor as often as he dared while not ignoring his mother, trying at
least to pass his courses, and all the while keeping the great secret of
his engagement even from his roommate. He fell asleep on the mid
night train from New York to Boston, dozed in class, suffered con
stantly from the sinus trouble that always intensified when he was
overworked and anxious. "It is dreadfully hard," he told his mother
with his usual cheery bravado, "to be a student, a social whirler, a
'prominent and democratic fellow/ and a fiance, all at the same time
but it is worthwhile."

But to Eleanor he evidently confessed that separation from her
made him miserable, that he was drained and sometimes depressed. She
worried about him. "I never knew such a busy person as you are," she

Keeping the Name in the Family 325

told him. "Please try to get a little rest sometime." She was sympathetic
when he lost his race for class marshal, and anxious that she herself was
too happy; surely such bliss would arouse "the envy of the gods" and
bring down disaster on them both. She heard a rumor that there was
a diphtheria epidemic in Cambridge, and wrote pleading with him to
be especially careful; diphtheria was "the disease I particularly dread
having the people I care for exposed to" the disease that had killed
her mother and her oldest brother. Sara was worried, too, and Franklin
assured both that it had all been a false alarm.

At some point that winter, perhaps during the Christmas holidays,
Sara had told Franklin of her plan to rent a house in Boston to be near
him. He had openly opposed it. The added strain of rationing still
more of his time to make sure he was being sufficiently attentive to his
mother would have been too much, and he would not even consider
any scheme which would forbid him to see his fiancee for more than
a week or two at a time. Remembering that the trip he and his mother
had taken together to Europe the first summer after his father's death
had been relatively without strain, he suggested as an alternative that
they might consider a Caribbean cruise in March. Lathrop Brown
could come, too. If he was to be cut off from Eleanor in any case, he
might as well have the best possible time; the West Indies would be
a much more congenial place to spend five frigid weeks in February
and March than Cambridge.

Sara eagerly agreed. She would be traveling with her son again, and
she may also have recalled her own voyage to China that had helped
her forget Stanford White twenty-seven years before. Perhaps the
memory of Eleanor would fade, too. 5

5. The Caribbean voyage has always previously been described as entirely Sara's idea, but
in part of an unpublished letter written to her son on April 21, 1934, she emphatically denied
having initiated it. This letter represents her only firsthand account of her part in the Roosevelt
courtship and marriage. She was moved to write, she told FDR, because of a new book, The New
Dealers, a breezy insider's look at the Roosevelt administration by "The Unofficial Observer,"
a pseudonym for the journalist John Franklin Carter. Sara did not like its treatment of her: "The
'Unofficial Observer' seems very intimate with our family affairs & in the pages I read there were
three falsehoods about me. I do wish I had been left out of the picture!

"1st fib (to use a mild term) that your Mother whisked you off to the West Indies to prevent
your leaving Harvard to be married! Going to the W.I. was your idea, rather than for me to take
a house in Boston.

"2nd fib. That 'I tried to defer your marriage' the most I ever said was that you were both
very young 18 and 21.

"3rd fib. That after your illness I wanted to 'take you to Hyde Park' to 'baby' you & make
an invalid of you. All I did was to say that if the doctors thought best for you to have for some
months a quiet life, I would keep Hyde Park open & live there for a time.

"Well, it makes no difference to me, tho' I felt badly for a time & slept badly, wondering
who had told such tales. Now, I feel I would rather not know. Some people will resent it & it
seems rather horrid. All the rest [of the book] seems interesting & I hope true. "

326 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Meanwhile, on January 11, 1904, she again drove up to St. James
Church alone and watched while the masons set the polished granite
cap in place above Mr. James's grave. She had been too loving and
dutiful a wife ever to consider going against her late husband's wishes
in a matter so important as his burial: Mr. James lies next to his
Rebecca, just as he had wished. But Sara did ask the stonecutters
whether when the time came her casket might be slipped in above his
and beneath the same side of the monument so that she, too, might be
reunited with him. A drawing was made for her showing how this
might easily be accomplished, and she filed it away against the future.
"At last it is done," she wrote that evening, "and it is entirely as James
would have had it done, but I have no more to do, only to think and
remember. "

A week later, still another link with Mr. James was cut. Tip, the
black Pomeranian that had been such a comfort to him in his last
months, was killed by one of the many trains that sped along the river
below Springwood each day. The big house echoed without him, she
noted in her journal; the dog had been "with me all the time."

Perhaps to bolster her spirits, she went into the city and took
Eleanor, Helen Roosevelt, and Muriel Robbins to the theater to see
Candida "the first play I have been to since my great sorrow. It
seemed strange to be there. It is a clever little piece by Bernard Shaw."

Eleanor thought it much better than that. She had already seen it
several times, evidently mesmerized by the character of the heroine,
Candida, whose quiet but immovable devotion to her husband was the
secret source of his strength. Her husband is "a first-rate clergyman,"
according to the playwright, a big hearty Christian socialist known for
the eloquence and vigor of his preaching, and in the play's climactic
scene Candida explains her little-understood role in her husband's life
to a would-be lover, the penniless young poet Eugene Marchbanks.
Her husband, she tells him, has been "spoiled from his cradle. We go
once a fortnight to see his parents. You should come with us, Eugene,
to see the pictures of the hero of that household. James as a baby! The
most wonderful of all babies. James holding his first school prize
. . . James as the captain of his eleven! James in his first frock coat!
James under all sorts of glorious circumstances! You know how strong
he is ... how clever he is: how happy. . . . Ask James' mother and his
three sisters what it costs to save James the trouble of doing anything

but be strong and clever and happy Ask the tradesmen who want

to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them

Keeping the Name in the Family 327

off. When there is money to give he gives it: when there is money to
refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love
for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make
him master here, though he does not know it."

But her husband does know it, and "quite overcome," now ac
knowledges it to the world: "It's all true, every word. What I am you
have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart.
You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving

care to me."

Both the tall diffident girl and the beautiful determined older
woman whom she followed up the aisle of the theater at the end of the
play that evening wanted to play Candida's role in Franklin's drama;
each wished to be the sum of all loving care to him.

Franklin, Sara, and Lathrop were to sail on Saturday, February 6,
aboard the Prinzessin Victoria Luisa, the same ship on which mother
and son had cruised through the Scandinavian fiords two summers
earlier. Eleanor and Franklin had hoped to spend a day or two together
in New York before their long forced separation began, but at the last
moment, Eleanor's Cousin Henry Parish fell ill and rushed out of town
in search of fresh air; his wife went with him. "No one not even you
dear can come to the house till they get back," Eleanor wrote Franklin
in some desperation. "It is not proper for me to have you come to see
me when I'm not chaperoned. I don't know what to do but perhaps
you can think of something." Franklin could. He wrote his mother
gently insisting that she invite Eleanor to Springwood for a day.
"Nobody need know a thing about it and she wouldn't be any trouble
as far as getting off is concerned for I can pack all my things in half
an hour." If she did not agree to invite Eleanor, he said, he would risk
the scandal and go to New York himself on Friday to see her. Sara
acquiesced, and Franklin and Eleanor had Thursday together at Hyde
Park. Before they parted, Eleanor promised to be in Washington,
visiting with Bamie, when Franklin and his mother reached there in
March on their way home.

The cruise began badly two days later. Franklin was "tired and
blue," Sara noted, "Lathrop Brown looks ill," and there were "too
many passengers." The sea was rough as well, the air cold and dank.
It took several days of sailing south before they began to feel better.

They stopped at St. Thomas, San Juan, and Barbados. It was Mardi
Gras at Trinidad the town of Port of Spain was "very gay," Sara

328 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

noted and in the evening she, Franklin, and Lathrop dined at the
Queen's Park Hotel, and then the two young men attended a costume
ball, dancing with the daughters of local officials while Sara looked on.
Such dances were arranged at several ports u to entertain the passen
gers," Brown remembered, "and [to] give the people who lived in 'out
of the way' places a chance to meet strangers and perhaps rich Ameri
cans. 7 ' Among those with whom Franklin waltzed that evening was a
beautiful Frenchwoman of perhaps thirty whose interest in the slim
young Harvard senior with the celebrated name seemed unusually
intense or so Sara thought. Worse, Franklin seemed flattered by her
attention, laughing even more heartily than usual as he whirled her
around the floor. His mother may have hoped that their cruise would
cool his interest in Eleanor, but not this way; the woman was clearly
an adventuress. She chided Franklin. He was amused by her concern
and enjoyed teasing her about it. Thirty-two years later, on his way
to visit South America as President of the United States, FDR took the
time to write a note to his mother suggesting that he might stop at
Trinidad on the way home, "and perhaps I may meet the famous
French lady!" 6

The ship anchored off the Venezuelan coast on February 19, and
the passengers went ashore. Sara enjoyed the precipitous train ride that
took them over the steep hills to Caracas, but did not enjoy the "dirty
hotel Venezuela" in which they spent the night. "Caracas is called there
'the Paris of South America,' " she noted, "but I failed to see the
resemblance." 7 Entering the harbor at Santiago, Cuba, a week later,

6. Some years later a puzzled writer came across this opaque reference and wrote Lathrop
Brown to ask him about it. "The 'Famous French Lady' is a character which has grown in the
telling," Brown answered. "Many ladies of 30 can flatter youngsters of [22] and annoy the
mothers of same. I think that here is a clear case of FDR being pleased by the lady's attention
and equally pleased to find how annoyed his mother was about it. The whole affair was nothing
as I remember. There are many idle hours on a cruise, and there was little enough to see and
do on this particular one, except in Cuba." Then, with the discretion with which he responded
to most questions about his roommate's Harvard years, Brown added a note: "I think I would
omit any reference to the incident, lest it be misconstrued."

In most accounts, it has been assumed that the French lady was a fellow passenger aboard
the Roosevelts' ship. But FDR's own reference to Trinidad in his letter to his mother suggests
to me that he encountered her on that island and that he left her there when the Prinzessin
Victoria Luisa sailed on the next day. She may of course have been aboard, but had there been
anything more to their relationship than a genial flirtation it seems unlikely that FDR would have
continued for long to joke about it with his mother.

Sources: Lathrop Brown to Sidney Shalett, January 15, 1959, PPF 2094, FDRL; Roosevelt
and Shalett, Affectionately, FDR, pages 30-31; SDR Journal, FDRL.

7. This visit or FDR's colorful memory of it inspired one of his favorite stories. He told
it at the White House during a toast to the visiting president of Venezuela in January 1944.
"When I was in college, in my senior year, I went down with my roommate on one of those
I am sorry to say German cruises down through the West Indies. And we got down to

Keeping the Name in the Family 329

they sailed past Morro Castle and the rusting hulks of Spanish cruisers
destroyed by U.S. Navy shells during the Spanish-American War, and
eagerly went ashore to explore the battlefields of El Caney and San
Juan, where Cousin Theodore had made himself a national hero just
six years earlier; Franklin carefully photographed the ground over
which his hero had led his celebrated charge.

Back aboard ship on February 29, and hurrying across the deck,
Sara stumbled over an obstruction and fell forward onto her face. "I
think I broke my nose," she wrote that evening, "the doctor says not. "
But she spent three painful days in her berth, visited by the captain
"very kind and sympathetic about my horrid fall" before getting up,
her face still badly swollen "to go to lunch and pretend it is all right."
The accident had shaken her badly, made her "too nervous and un
comfortable to enjoy anything" for days, even though "Dear F. tries
to comfort me."

At Nassau on March 2 they were met by Evelyn Carter, the British
governor's daughter, whom Franklin had first come to know at Cam-
pobello in August. Sara liked Miss Carter and thought her parents, Sir
Gilbert and Lady Carter "very pleasant." Perhaps she quietly hoped
that the young woman's obvious feeling for Franklin would demon
strate to him that he need be in no hurry to marry. They spent four

Caracas . . , and my roommate and I went up to the clerk of the hotel and said, 'What's doing
tonight? We want to go to a cafe, someplace where they have dancing.' ... I don't know what
they would call it today, but probably a different name.

"And the clerk said, 'Oh, you can't do that. You have got to go to the opera.'

"My roommate and I said, 'We didn't come to Caracas to go to the opera.'

"He said, 'But you must. Everybody is going to the opera; they are giving Pagtiacci. ' Well,
I had been to the opera with my mother several times. I said, 'I have never heard of Pagliacci. '

" 'But,' he said, 'the great artist is singing.'

"I said, 'I don't care.'

" 'But/ he said, 'it's Caruso.'

"I said, 'I never heard of him.'

"In New York nobody had ever heard of him, and yet at that time Caruso was considered
the greatest tenor in all the world. He had sung at Caracas before, in Buenos Aires, in Rio and
in Lima, I think. He was one of the great singers known to all South America.

"So, because there was nowhere else to go, we went to the opera. And he was perfectly
marvelous.

"After we got back to New York, I talked to some of my musical friends about Caruso and
Pagliacci, but they had never heard of him. Years later, Caruso was taken on by the Metropolitan
Opera Company ... and of course became the greatest tenor of all time. But I have always said
that my roommate and I discovered Caruso."

FDR may in fact have attended the opera in Caracas, though his mother's journal makes no
mention of it, but he did not hear Caruso, who was himself then at sea, on his way from New
York to Monte Carlo; nor was the tenor unknown to New York music lovers, having just made
his debut in their city.

Sources: Public Papers and Addresses, 1944-1945, pages 46-47; Stanley Jackson, Caruso,
page 110.

330 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

days with the Carters, bathing in the brilliant blue water off Hog Island
and later sitting beneath the palms, eating oranges and bananas and
cracking open coconuts to drink the sweet milk. They played charades
after dinner at Government House one evening, and the next morning
boarded a glass-bottomed boat to watch shoals of brilliantly colored
fish flicker over the bright coral. Franklin enjoyed himself in the Baha
mas he almost always enjoyed himself, wherever he was and Eve
lyn Carter did her best to charm him. But he remained unmoved. "In
the back of his mind," Lathrop Brown recalled many years later, "there
was always Eleanor."

Eleanor herself was not so confident. Franklin's absence drove her
dangerously close to despondency. Alone in her cousin's house she had
been too sad even to write to her fiance for two days. She felt exhausted
and "cross with myself," she told him, and with Hall, who was doing
poorly at school: "I don't really know how to make him more ambi
tious & it is really discouraging to have him so bad." But whatever her
disappointment over Hall, her real anxieties centered on Franklin. Like
her father, he had gone away, promising to return and always to love
her. But could she believe him? Was he having such a good time in
the West Indies that those promises would be forgotten? she asked in
her first letter to him, adding "that's not such a very pleasing thought."
As soon as he received the letter he telegraphed his reassurance.

The Roosevelts landed at Miami on March 6 and stopped in Palm
Beach, where Sara noted the "crowds of overdressed vulgar people"
that thronged the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and she and Franklin rode
side by side in bicycle chairs to view the ostrich and alligator farms.
Later, Sara added, "I watched Franklin in the surf and was glad when
he came out."

They finally reached the Hotel Shoreham in Washington at a little
after ten in the morning on March 10. A note was waiting for Franklin
at the desk. It was from Eleanor: "Just a line to tell you how more than
glad I am to have you here at last. I will he home as near twelve as
possible, Honey, and I hope you will be able to get here. Auntie Bye,
will, I think, be in about then also."

They could still not see one another alone. Bamie called Sara's
room about noon, inviting her and her son for tea, not lunch. Too
impatient to sit still till then, Franklin took his mother for a two-hour
walk.

We know no details of Franklin and Eleanor's reunion that after
noon, but its outcome was clear. Years later, Eleanor would write

Keeping the Name in the Family 331

proudly that despite the long sea voyage and his mother's hopes,
"Franklin's feelings had not changed."

Sara did not surrender easily. The five-week cruise had not altered
her son's determination; perhaps a still longer stay abroad would.
Sometime during their brief stay in Washington, she took Franklin
with her to see an old family friend, Joseph Choate, the venerable
Republican lawyer and diplomat who was home for consultations from
his post as ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Franklin's father had
briefly served as secretary to Ambassador James Buchanan more than
half a century earlier, she reminded Choate, and his half brother, Rosy,
had been first secretary at London for several years. Wouldn't it be
fitting if Franklin now joined him there for a time as his personal
secretary? It would be such good experience for a young man inter
ested in public life. The ambassador was courteous but unyielding:
Franklin was too young, and, besides, he had already engaged a secre
tary.

Sara had emptied her arsenal. Franklin escorted her home to Hyde
Park, then returned to Harvard. She wrote him the next night.

Darling Franklin,

I am feeling pretty blue. You are gone. The journey is over & I
feel as if the time were not likely to come again when I shall take a trip
with my dear boy, as we are not going abroad, but I must try to be
unselfish & of course my dear child I do rejoice in your happiness, & shall
not put any stones or straws even in the way of it. I shall go to town a
week from Friday just to be with you when I can. I have put away your
albums & loved fussing over them. . . . Oh, how still the house is, but it
is home and full of memories dear to me. Do write. I am already longing
to hear.

Your loving,

Mother

Sara missed Franklin terribly that spring. "I wish I could go into
your room here and wake you this morning," she wrote from Spring-
wood on the first of May. "It is like June and you would blink and call
out, 'Shut the blinds!' " But she knew now that he would not ever be
permanently there again, and that if she wished to remain close to him
she must grow close to Eleanor as well. And Eleanor, who understood
better than most the terrors abandonment inspired, sympathized with
Sara's fears of a lonely future and sought to reassure her as best she
could. "Don't let her feel that the last trip with you is over," she told

332 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

Franklin shortly after he returned from the West Indian cruise. "We
three must take them together in the future, that is all, and though I
know three will never be the same to her, still someday I hope that she
will really love me and I would be very glad if I thought she was even
the least bit reconciled to me now. I will try to see her whenever she
comes in town."

The two women now seemed inseparable. Sara took "the dear
child" with her to shop, to tea, to dine, to the theater and the opera,
for long drives and short walks. "Always a pleasure to have the nieces,"
she noted one crowded weekend at Springwood, "and added joy to
have Eleanor now." Sara traveled to Tivoli for luncheon one afternoon
to meet Grandmother Hall. It went well, Eleanor reported to Franklin;
"Vallie did not appear, much to my relief. [Sara] was very sweet.
Grandma quite fell in love with her." Cousin Susie Parish felt the same;
Sara had been "sweet" to her, too: "I don't think, Honey, your Mother
could be anything else."

The Halls approved of Franklin, too. He visited Tivoli in May and
made a point of admiring the fine books in Grandfather Hall's library.
Even Vallie was "exemplary" while he was there, he told Sara. "I seem
to have a good effect on him."

And Sara slowly drew Eleanor into the Delano circle. Its unques
tioning family cohesiveness was a revelation to her. Among Sara's
brothers and sisters, Eleanor wrote, "there was a sense of security
which I had never known before. . . . They were a clan, and if
misfortune befell one of them, the others rallied. . . . The Delanos
might disapprove of one another, and if so, they were not slow to
express their disapproval, but let someone outside so much as hint at
criticism, and the clan was ready to tear him limb from limb!" To her
pleased astonishment, they all welcomed Eleanor. Price Collier in
sisted on calling her by her first name, she told Franklin; "I really think
it is about time you grew jealous!" And Mrs, Collier asked to be "called
'Aunt Kassie' the other day! I thought it was a little previous, however,
& I have not done it yet, but I suppose I shall soon!" The prospect of
meeting Aunt Dora, not due home from Paris until the fall, was
somehow more daunting. "I'm afraid for fear she won't like me," she
told Franklin. "Please say nice things about me to her, won't you?"
Eleanor visited Algonac too, and found it "perfectly lovely. The house
is fascinating & I would have liked to make Mr. Hitch tell me all about
his things, but he had such a petrifying effect upon me that I hardly
dared speak to him." "Mrs. Hitch was too sweet," however, and "the

Keeping the Name in the Family 333

view is one of the finest on the river, I think. I wanted to stand and
look at it all day." Her pleasure must have pleased Sara.

It was comforting to have Sara take such an interest in her and to
have the Delanos so hospitable, but it was Franklin for whom she
longed. "I wish you were here, dear, to kiss me goodnight/' she had
written him that winter, and by April she wrote that "I cannot even
control my thoughts now. I find myself looking at a page and thinking
of you." Every cold he developed was cause for alarm, every lapse
between letters potential evidence that he was ill or losing interest. She
lived for his letters. "The family think it so queer," she wrote from
Tivoli, "that I should enjoy a cold drive of 8 mi. over atrocious roads
every afternoon where there 'really is nothing to go for!' But I have
good reasons." And she delighted in his triumphs and in the important
part he said her support played in them. When he was elected perma
nent chairman of his class committee after losing his race for class
marshal, she told him how pleased she was, "for I know how much it
meant to you and I always want you to succeed. Dearest, if you only
knew how happy it makes me to think that your love for me is making
you try all the harder to do well, and oh! I hope that some day I will
be more of a help to you."

Franklin and Eleanor managed to see quite a lot of one another that
June. On the eighteenth, Helen Roosevelt married Teddy Robinson
at Hyde Park. The older guests stayed with Sara at Springwood, the
younger crowd at Rosy's. Franklin was an usher, Eleanor a brides
maid, and they stood solemnly together in a formal group portrait of
the wedding party. The tall hemlock hedge of Sara's rose garden
served as the backdrop.

On the twenty-fourth, Franklin received his Harvard diploma at
Cambridge. Eleanor sat with Sara in the audience in Sanders Theater.
"F. in cap and gown sat on the stage," Sara noted proudly, "as he is
a class officer." Only the absence of Mr. James lessened her pleasure
and that of her son. The two women also attended a more informal
traditional ceremony held outdoors behind Hollis Hall, a raucous mix
of skits and gag gifts thought hilarious enough for the Boston Globe to
cover in detail Charlie Shea, for example, the best actor in the class,
was given a big dry goods case out of which stepped a small black girl
"to act as his leading lady." The captain of the baseball team was next
"arrested for stealing bases by F. D. Roosevelt," the Globe reported,
"who was given a New York policeman's helmet to start him on his

334 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

political career as the successor of his uncle (sic), Theodore Roosevelt."
Everyone evidently thought that was funny, too. 8

Eleanor planned to spend the month of August at Campobello,
stopping on the way for a week at Islesboro, her Aunt Corinne's
summer home in Dark Harbor, Maine. It was a busy place, with
cousins and their friends coming and going. Other men sought Elea
nor's company, and she had to find tactful ways to deflect their interest
without betraying her secret. "I really think the family must think me
a dreadful flirt," she told Franklin, u or an awfully poor one."

Franklin grew impatient. Why didn't she come to Campobello
sooner and take the shortest route, he asked, changing trains at Mill-
bridge, Maine, instead of going all the way through to Bangor? He
could meet her at Millbridge. She didn't think that wise, she answered,
for if her train was late and the connecting train left on time, she and
Franklin might find themselves stranded with only her maid for an
escort. "That is one of the drawbacks, dear, to not announcing our
engagement though we did not think of it at the time."

Franklin remedied the problem his own way, sailing unannounced
into Dark Harbor on the Half Moon with two Harvard friends, and
staying several days. He wired Sara, who was expecting him at Cam
pobello, that the coast was fogbound. Young Corinne Robinson, with
whom Eleanor had been reading Browning sonnets when his yacht
arrived, was pleased. "It was very nice to see him again," she noted in
her diary, though "I cannot decide whether it filled E. with joy or not.
I think he is very crazy about her, but she not about him. It is truly
pathetic." In this instance, at least, Eleanor was evidently better able
to conceal her feelings than Franklin was or perhaps it was just that
she took her pledge of secrecy more seriously than he did. In any case,
Corinne and her mother both took Eleanor aside, she later told Frank
lin, and gravely warned her against injuring his feelings, "because they
thought I did not realize how serious you might be, etc., and I led them
on very wickedly and made believe I was much worried at the thought

8. Among the orations heard by the three Roosevelts that day was "The Millionaire in
Politics," composed and delivered by one of Franklin's classmates, Fred Wayne Catlett. Of the
nineteen millionaires then serving in the U.S. Senate, Catlett noted, all but three were self-made
men: "This situation ... is typical of the whole of political life, that is, the man born rich
generally shuns politics and scorns politics, while his energetic, ambitious but less aristocratic
self-made brother dives with zest into the dirty but still alluring political pool." The problem was
not that the very rich were running for office they were, after all, bulwarks of "stability and
conservatism so valuable in a republic," he reassured his Harvard listeners but that the over
zealous among them brought "illegitimate business methods" with them into the arena and
bought their own elections. The remedy lay in reforming the voter, not the candidate, Catlett
concluded; "we must give him a wholesale moral education to prevent his wholesale bribery."

Keeping the Name in the Family 335

you might really care for me in more than a friendly way! May I be
forgiven for all my white lies."

The month at Campobello, once it finally began, went all too fast
"Oh! so quickly," Eleanor later wrote. She and Franklin walked and
sailed and read aloud to one another, and did their best to have at least
a little time alone together each day. Evelyn Carter was back on the
island again; so was Frances Pell. But Franklin's interest in them was
only polite. He played a good deal of golf while Eleanor and Sara went
walking together, and he won both the Challenge Cup and the Presi
dent's Cup, Sara noted, the latter "a very handsome silver one." And
he and Eleanor took part in a series of tableaux at the club that raised
eighty dollars for the island's tiny library. Franklin was "a very funny
'Douglas' [fir] in kilts, etc.," according to Sara. On August 29, Elea
nor's last full day on the island, Sara and Mrs. Pell drove her and
Franklin out to Eastern Head, a favorite picnic spot, and left them
there to lunch alone beneath the pines and later to walk back to the
cottage together along the shore road. The next day Sara and Franklin
both escorted Eleanor to her train. "I wish you could have seen Frank
lin's face the night you left Campo," Mrs. Kuhn wrote Eleanor later.
"He looked so tired and I felt everybody bored him. He could not
stand Evelyn's chatter."

Franklin and his mother moved in October to a rented house at 200
Madison Avenue and he began his studies at Columbia Law School.
They do not seem to have interested him much. He would fail two
courses his first year, blaming circumstances rather than himself, just
as he had at Groton. "It certainly shows the uncertainty of marks," he
told Sara, "for I had expected much lower marks in some of the others
and thought I had done as well on the two I failed as in those I passed
with B." Part of the problem may have been the busy social life Rosy
now arranged for him; as promised, Franklin's half brother introduced
him to influential New York friends and helped get him elected to
several of his clubs.

But Franklin's mind was largely occupied with seeing Eleanor and
with the coming announcement of their engagement. On October 11,
her twentieth birthday, he gave her as a secret gift her engagement
ring, chosen at Tiffany's "after much inspection and deliberation." "I
am longing to have my birthday present from you for good," she wrote
to him from Tivoli, "and yet I love it so I know I shall find it hard
to keep from wearing it! You could not have found a ring I would have

336 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

liked better, even if you were not you! This sounds odd but is quite
sensible."

The secret was becoming burdensome. Later that month Franklin
and Eleanor were both guests at the Robinson home at Orange, New
Jersey, where, young Corinne noted, "E. and F. are comic. They
avoided each other like the black plague and told beautifully concocted
lies and deceived us sweetly in every direction. I was so amused
... of course suspecting something made it all the more sure. I would
bet they are engaged." But when she asked Franklin about it as he took
her for a drive in the runabout, he did his airy best to put her off. She
was not fooled: "I had a splendid talk with F.R. and he enjoyed himself
telling delicious stories (lies). I told him he had a very deceitful nature,
which he has, I believe." Eleanor was no more communicative. Three
days later, she and Corinne went driving. "We neither of us mentioned
F.," Corinne noted in her journal, "but I think he was on both our
minds."

The official announcement was finally to be made on December
first, but Franklin hoped to tell the assembled Delanos about it in
person over the Thanksgiving table at Fairhaven. At the beginning of
November he fell ill, however, with what at first seemed simply a cold.
After three days without improvement, an anxious Sara called in the
family physician, Dr. George Draper, who examined the patient and
confessed that he could not "quite see what was wrong." Sara was
privately "sure it is liver," and it was eventually thought to be jaundice.
He stayed home from class in any case, sitting listlessly by the fire.
Eleanor was privately terrified but did her best to cheer him up during
her frequent visits. Sara read aloud to him from the memoirs of Robert
E. Lee. Rosy came to dine and play piquet.

Sara finally had to cancel plans to go to Fairhaven, but Franklin did
write a letter announcing his news that was read aloud at the table, and
the entire family wired back its congratulations. Franklin was largely
recovered by the time the official announcement appeared in the news
papers but Eleanor was ill with grippe, Sara said "very weak and
ill. Poor F. much upset and I am anxious." The next day she seemed
better but "very weak and looks like a shadow."

Again, Eleanor not Franklin was the important Roosevelt in all the
newspaper coverage of the coming wedding. She had "more claim to
good looks than any of the Roosevelt cousins," according to Town
Topics. "An attractive girl . . . unusually tall and very fair," another
newspaper noted, "and has a charming grace of manner that has made

Keeping the Name in the Family 337

her a favorite since her debut." Franklin was identified only as "a
member of the New York Yacht Club," and as the former editor of the
Crimson who "was defeated in a close struggle for election as a class
day officer."

A blizzard of congratulatory letters descended upon the couple.
Warren Delano IV, the oldest and most like their father of all Sara's
brothers and sisters, vowed that Eleanor need never u doubt . . . being
taken in by all her fiance's family." Letters from the Hitches and
Colliers and Delanos and from Aunt Dora all echoed his welcome. The
Halls welcomed Fratlklin, too, Grandmother Hall attesting that he was
"a fine man." Alice Roosevelt who would be Eleanor's maid of honor
thought the news "simply too nice to be true." The Reverend Sher-
rard Billings of Groton wrote Franklin that it had been "a dream of
mine for some years that you would be a man widely useful to your
country, and a sympathetic wife will be a great help to you on the road
to realizing my dream and I am thankful and glad." 9

Here and there among the members of the family, public enthusi
asm was secretly tempered by private fears for the future. Corinne
Robinson Alsop remembered, for example, that her first thought on
hearing news of the engagement had been that Eleanor had "lived
through so much unhappiness, and then to [plan to marry] a man with
a mother like Cousin Sally ... A more determined and possessive
woman than I have ever known." But to Eleanor she merely wrote
"Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah," and boasted that she had been the first to
predict it.

Franklin must have been especially pleased by a letter from the
White House:

Dear Franklin,

We are greatly rejoiced over the good news. I am as fond of
Eleanor as if she were my daughter; and I like you, and trust you, and
believe in you. No other success in life not the Presidency, or anything

9. In This Is My Story, Eleanor wrote that her engagement had already been announced
before Thanksgiving in 1904, and that she and Franklin had spent that holiday with the Delanos
at Fairhaven. Her mother-in-law's journal and family letters show that this was not the case, and
the eloquent description of the impact upon her of the Delanos' closeness as a family that appears
on pages 117-120 of that book must date from Thanksgiving of the following year, when the
newlywed Roosevelts were indeed guests at the homestead.

The secret was well kept. The last members of the family to hear the news were Helen and
Teddy Robinson, who were still traveling on their honeymoon in January of 1905 and were idly
leafing through a heap of old newspapers in the lobby of their hotel in Colombo, Ceylon, when
they came upon the announcement in a month-old copy of the New York Herald.

Source: Helen Roosevelt Robinson's diary, courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.

'338 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

else begins to compare with the joy and happiness that come in and from
the love of the true man and the true woman, the love which never sinks
lover and sweetheart in man and wife. You and Eleanor are true and
brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly; and golden years open
before you. May all good fortune attend you both, ever.
Give my love to your dear mother.

Your aff. cousin,
Theodore Roosevelt

Sara was surely proud of that letter, too, but not as proud as she
must have been of the one the President's sister Bamie sent to Eleanor.
"My own darling soft-eyed child," it said in part, "your letter has given
me great joy. I love Franklin as you know on his own personal account
because he is so attractive & also because I believe his character is like
his Father's whom Uncle Will & I always feel was the most absolutely
honorable upright gentleman (the last in its highest sense) that we ever
knew."

Franklin asked Endicott Peabody to officiate at the wedding "It
would not be the same without you," he told the rector and Peabody
rearranged his schedule in order to be on hand. Meanwhile, Eleanor
asked her Uncle Ted if he would be willing to stand in her father's
place and give her away. He enthusiastically agreed, and the wedding
was set for Friday afternoon, March 17, 1905 St. Patrick's Day, when
the President was to be in the city to deliver two speeches.

The engaged couple would see a lot of him that month. He had
been elected President in his own right in November by a landslide.
("I am no longer a political accident," he had told Edith.) Franklin had
been pleased to cast his own first presidential vote for his cousin, still
more pleased to be asked, along with Eleanor, to be Bamie's guest at
the March 4 inaugural. He sat with his fiancee just behind the Presi
dent's immediate family on the steps of the Capitol and heard TR
pledge himself to a "square deal for every man." Eleanor was too
excited to pay much attention to what her uncle was saying, she
remembered; she was conscious only that she was witnessing history
up close, and she "never expected to see another inauguration in the
family." Franklin forgot nothing.

The two intervening weeks were filled with parties in honor of the
bride and groom, their bridesmaids and ushers. Some 340 wedding
gifts were received and gratefully acknowledged leather-bound sets

Keeping the Name in the Family 339

of Browning and Emerson, Stevenson and Bronte, because everyone
knew Franklin was a collector; several gold cigarette cases, also for
him; a drawing of Bamie for Eleanor; thirteen clocks for the new
household, and as many silver trays.

The wedding was to be held in the drawing room of Mrs. Ludlow's
house on East Seventy-sixth street; by opening the doors between her
drawing room and Cousin Susy's next door, some 200 guests could
comfortably be accommodated. Most of the wedding arrangements
were left to Eleanor's Hall relations the orchestra and refreshments,
the palms and lilacs and roses that would fill the houses and form the
bower beneath which the couple was to be married. And they made
certain that the Hall side of Eleanor's heritage was not overlooked. Her
satin wedding gown was covered with Brussels lace that had been
worn by both her grandmother and her mother at their weddings; her
long veil was held in place by a diamond crescent that had once
belonged to her mother whose birthday also happened to fall on her
daughter's wedding day.

But otherwise the event was to be a Roosevelt celebration. Franklin
saw to that. Rosy, suffering from one of the many mostly psychoso
matic illnesses that now plagued him, was resting in Florida and unable
at the last moment to act as the best man. Lathrop Brown stood in for
him. All Franklin's ushers were cousins or classmates. Each wore a
diamond stickpin incorporating the three feathers of the family crest
of which Mr. James had been so fond; Franklin had designed them
himself. And he made certain that Eleanor's bridesmaids who in
cluded Alice Roosevelt and Corinne Robinson also displayed the
crest in a more startlingly realistic form: three authentic silver-tipped
ostrich plumes worn in their hair. Eleanor wore the crest as well, as
part of Franklin's wedding gift, a gold watch with her initials picked
out in diamonds on the back, suspended from a diamond pin in the
same triple-feather pattern.

Franklin spent the evening of March 16 quietly with his mother at
200 Madison Avenue his "last night at home as a boy," she noted in
her journal. And as the actual ceremony grew nearer the next after
noon, he was "calm and happy" she said; so calm and happy, in fact,
that he lost track of the time, chatting about the old days at Groton
with Lathrop and the rector in a small anteroom in the Ludlow house.

The guests began filing to their seats in the candle-lit Ludlow
drawing room. Sara sat up front, not far from Grandmother Hall, and
wearing a white dress covered with black lace that had belonged to her

340 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

mother, Catherine Delano. Behind them sat the Oyster Bay Roosevelts
and the Delanos "Dora, Annie & Fred, Fred & Tilly, Kassie &
ALL," Sara noted proudly.

While Eleanor and her bridesmaids were dressing upstairs a cable
from England was handed to her. "Bonbeur, " it said, and it was signed
"Souvestre." 10

The sounds of the St. Patrick's Day parade banging its way north
along Fifth Avenue and of the crowds that lined the sidewalks to cheer
it on drifted steadily into the drawing room, the shouting suddenly
louder and more insistent at about three-thirty. The President's car
riage had arrived. He was a little late as he waved his top hat to the
crowd and hurried inside, a wilted shamrock drooping in his button
hole. He took the Ludlow stairs two at a time.

The ceremony could begin. The orchestra swung into the wedding
march, doing its best to overcome the relentless blare of "The Wearing
of the Green." The bridesmaids appeared, gliding down the stairs and
up the aisle beneath their gravely nodding plumes. Franklin, Lathrop,
and the rector scrambled to their places at the altar beneath a bower
of palms and pink roses.

Then Eleanor appeared on the staircase with the President. Frank
lin waited under the palms as she came slowly toward him, taller than
the beaming uncle whose arm she held, and looking more lovely than
she ever had before. Those among the guests who remembered her
mother murmured to one another; for the first time she seemed to some
of them to look like Anna Hall.

Peabody began the Episcopal service in his big confident voice,
stumbling a little over the words in the dim, unsteady candlelight.
When he asked "Who giveth this woman in marriage?" one guest
recalled, TR answered in "loud emphatic tones," "/ do!" instead of
merely stepping forward to place his niece's hand in Franklin's. They
joined hands anyway, and the rings and vows were at last exchanged.

"Well, Franklin," the President said as he reached up to kiss his
niece. "There's nothing like keeping the name in the family." Then
he led the way into the dining room, where a collation was being
served. Most of the guests followed in his wake, eager to stay close to
the expansive, voluble TR. The bride and groom trailed along behind.
Even the cutting of the wedding cake failed to attract many onlookers
until the President was persuaded to come and get his slice.

10. Mademoiselle Souvestre would die of cancer two days after her favorite pupil's wedding.

Keeping the Name in the Family 341

TR finally left at about five o'clock, running late for his speech to
the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick at Delmonico's, and by the time the
newlyweds had dressed to leave, only their closest friends and relatives
remained to pelt them with rice.

They were to spend their first week alone together at Hyde Park.

Sara later told Franklin and Eleanor that "Everyone says it was the
most perfect wedding, so simple & yet so 'elegant & refined,' etc etc.
... I think it was all perfect & ... I was very proud of both my dear
children." She cannot have liked Town Topics' treatment of the event:
Despite the presence of the President of the United States, it said, the
wedding had frankly been a disappointment. The Parishes were chas
tised for their "pathetic economy"; the food u was supplied by an
Italian caterer, not of the first class"; the flowers by "a Madison Avenue
florist of no particular fame; and the narrow staircase in the Parish
house [had] permitted only one person to ascend or descend at a time."
It was noted that Mrs. Vanderbilt had stayed at the reception only ten
minutes. But whatever Sara may have thought of the article as a whole,
she must have been at least momentarily pleased by its conclusion: On
the way out the front door, one guest had been overheard to say that
"the bridegroom had been especially handsome," and another had
agreed, adding, "Surprising for a Roosevelt."

The Roosevelt coachman met Franklin and his new bride at the
Hyde Park depot that evening, and drove them home to Springwood.
It was a clear starry night, but the wind off the river had turned cold,
and Franklin and Eleanor sat close together in the carriage, a robe
across their laps. They passed between the stone gates Mr. James had
brought up the road from the ruins of Mount Hope nearly forty years
before, and beneath the big trees that lined both sides of the drive, their
bare branches just visible against the sky.

The windows of the big house glowed bright across the lawn, and
when the carriage stopped and Franklin helped Eleanor down, Elespie,
the old Scottish housekeeper, was waiting in the open door to greet
them. Over the years she had seen to it that the wishes of both Rebecca
Howland and Sara Delano Roosevelt were carried out, and she had
once admitted to her mistress that if young Franklin had any faults she
could not see them. Elespie had grown deaf in the Roosevelts' service
and had to rely on a homemade ear trumpet to understand her orders
now, but she was still alert, and Eleanor remembered that she "looked

342 BEFORE THE TRUMPET

me over critically and appraisingly, wondering if I could come up to
her expectations as the wife of 'her boy.' "

Franklin and Eleanor followed along behind the old lady as she
slowly climbed the stairs, past the glass case containing Franklin's
mounted birds and the portrait of him painted at fourteen, and showed
them to their room.

Back in New York, Sara followed them as best she could in her
imagination. "My precious Franklin & Eleanor," she wrote that eve
ning. "It is a delight to write to you together & to think of you happy
at dear Hyde Park, just where my great happiness began."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I began to work on this book I assumed the end result would
be both slim and speculative. It is no longer slim, and it is all based on
documentary evidence more of it, and more of it previously unex
plored, than I had imagined possible.

Not long after I started my research, I had dinner with David
McCullough, the fearless biographer of those three great symbols of
American optimism and energy the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama
Canal, and Theodore Roosevelt. The task of burrowing my way
through the massive FDR archives then seemed more daunting every
day; so did the prospect of ever penetrating the private defenses of my
subject; and I wondered, also, if too many years spent editing other
people's manuscripts had spoiled my chances of producing one of my
own. He heard me out, then gave me some cheering advice. "Remem
ber," he said, "the great thing is that when you're finished it's your
book. Nobody else's."

For better or worse, it is mine, and I accept full responsibility for
its shortcomings. But for whatever virtues it has, I owe a great deal to
the kindness and counsel of colleagues, friends, and members of my
family. Most of those who helped me along the way are thanked in the
Source Notes at the end of the book, but several need to be acknowl
edged here as well, and in greater detail.

I want first to express my appreciation to nine scholars who occu
pied the Roosevelt field long before I got there, but who never hesi-

344 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

tated for a moment to offer help to a newcomer: Bernard Asbell,
Kenneth Davis, Frank Freidel, Joseph P. Lash, David McCullough,
Edmund and Sylvia Morris, Alfred B. Rollins, and Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr. And I owe a unique debt to Professor R. J. C. Butow, whose
discovery of the secret White House recordings got me started.

The President's sons, James and Franklin, Jr., and his grandson,
John R. Boettiger, were enormously helpful, too, responding even to
intrusive questions about their family with candor and care. And an
other member of the big Roosevelt clan, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.
FDR's distant cousin, the only child of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Elea
nor Roosevelt's beloved "Auntie Bye" graciously told me a host of
family tales which were not only full of fresh and intriguing informa
tion but which I found could be documented. Mr. Cowles is a biogra
pher's dream a superb storyteller who tells true stories.

I would also like to thank two individuals who were so close to
Eleanor Roosevelt as to have seemed part of her family Edna Gure-
witsch and Maureen Corr. Although they knew her only in her last
years, their insights into her mature personality and character were
invaluable to me in trying to understand her youth.

I worked with original documents at Harvard University, at the
New York Public Library and at the New- York Historical Society,
and am grateful to the staffs of all three institutions. The employees
of the National Park Service who look after Springwood and Val-Kill
especially Diane Boyce, Susan Brown, Donald McTernan, Margaret
Partridge, and Emily Wright were invariably helpful when con
fronted with my sometimes obsessively detailed questions about life at
those two places long ago.

But most of my research time was inevitably spent in the reading
room at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, and I would
like to thank individually those men and women on the library staff
whose patience, knowledge, and good humor made my many weeks
there so rewarding and so much fun: Supervisory Archivists Frances
Seeber and Raymond Teichman and librarian Joseph Marshall, as well
as Susan Busanko, Elizabeth Denier, Shellynne Eickhoff, John Ferris,
Marguerite Hubbard, Shirley Mahoney, Paul McLaughlin, Robert
Parks, Irene Prentiss, Mark Renovitch, and William Stickel.

This book could not have been researched or written without the
encouragement and informed advice of the library's director, Dr. Wil
liam R. Emerson. He has been both my mentor and my friend.

A number of people believed in this project at moments when I was

Acknowledgments 345

not entirely sure I did, among them Robbin Reynolds (now of Work
man Press), Buz Wyeth and Terry Karten of Harper & Row, and
especially Carl Brandt, my agent and friend.

Several other friends took the time to read and comment upon the
entire manuscript: Richard and Carol Snow, who saved me from more
embarrassments, large and small, than I care to admit; Professor
Charles B. Strozier, who worked hard to keep honest my speculations
about what went on in the minds of the reticent men and women about
whom I chose to write; and Dr. Pauline G. Vorhaus, who has a lot to
do with whatever coherence this book and its author may have.

Still closer to home, I want to apologize to Nathan, to Garrett, and
to Kelly, whom I too often overlooked in favor of furthering my book;
no writer could have a more loving and supportive family, and I only
hope they like the result.

Finally, I want to thank my wife and close reader, Diane, without
whom neither this book nor much else in my life could have been
accomplished. She has heard a good deal about Delanos and Roosevelts
over the past three years, and not the least miraculous thing about her
is that she doesn't seem to mind that there is more to come.

SOURCE NOTES

A brief note on sources: This book is based very largely upon original documents, most
of them found among the massive collections of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at
Hyde Park. A list of the collections I consulted will be found in the Bibliography that
follows these notes, along with the title, date, and place of publication for all the
important books, articles, and other materials I found especially useful.

To save space, in the notes to the individual chapters, I have referred to the
Roosevelt Library by the abbreviation FDRL, and have used initials to designate items
from several frequently used collections:

OF: President's Official File, followed by file number;

PPF: President's Personal File, followed by file number;

PSF: President's Secretary's File, followed by file number.

PROLOGUE: THE RIVER ROAD

The story of FDR and the ghoulish bishop and the account of Roosevelt's visit to his
mother's garden with Frances Perkins both come from her The Roosevelt I Knew, pages
145-146, supplemented by contemporary newspaper accounts of the cathedral service.
Further amplification of Roosevelt's antagonism toward Bishop Freeman is given in
an unpublished reminiscence by Will Alexander, Papers of the Franklin D. Roosevelt
Memorial Foundation, FDRL.

Calvin Coolidge's chilly view of American prospects appears in William E. Leuch-
tenberg, Franklin D, Roosevelt and the New Deal, page 28. The roll call of Roosevelt
legislation is here abridged from one offered by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in a speech
delivered before a group of former New Deal officials and their allies, March 7, 1983,
and kindly lent to me. Eleanor Roosevelt's summings-up of her husband's contribu
tions on both the domestic and foreign fronts are from Tbis I Remember, pages
347-348.

348 SOURCE NOTES

Merriman Smith and Harold Oliver remembered the sad singing at Charlotte and
described it to Bernard Asbell in When FDR Died, page 158. Joseph Alsop discusses
FDR's inclusiveness in his eloquent FDR: A Centenary Remembrance.

The President's original funeral instructions are on display at the FDRL. The
details of the Hyde Park ceremony are drawn from many sources, including newsreels
and radio reports; a series of recently discovered photographs of the second funeral
train at the Hyde Park depot, FDRL; an anonymous letter from a member of the escort
of honor; a brief unpublished memoir, "When FDR Came Home," written by the man
responsible for planning and supervising the Hyde Park rites, Colonel A. J. McGehee,
also recently deposited at the FDRL; and from Asbell, When FDR Died, pages 189-
199; Jim Bishop, FDR 's Last Year, pages 660-668; Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Sum
mer, page 166; and Henrietta Nesbitt, White House Diary, page 311.

Robert Sherwood's thoughts as he waited in the garden and his baffled assessment
of Roosevelt's personality are from his Roosevelt and Hopkins, pages 9 and 882. Henry
Morgenthau, Jr., is quoted on the difficulty of describing FDR in Sherwood, page 9;
while his story of the left and right hands comes from his diary entry for May 2 1, 1936,
and is quoted in John Morton Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau, page 127. Mrs. Roose
velt's admission that even she had not been her husband's confidante comes from a
conversation she had with her son James and appears on page 3 1 5 of his Affectionately,
FDR, written with Sidney Shalett Mrs. Collier's wish to accompany FDR's body to
Hyde Park is quoted in Bishop, page 660.

The number of times FDR visited Hyde Park during his presidency is my estimate,
based on sampling the White House usher's diaries at the FDRL; I suspect that it is
low.

1: MR. JAMES

James Roosevelt is an elusive figure. He was an upright and determinedly private man
to begin with, persuaded that a gentleman's duty was to stay out of the newspapers.
Then, too, all his papers written or received before 1866 were destroyed when Mount
Hope was razed in that year. This account of his early years and first marriage, which
I believe to be the fullest ever attempted, is largely drawn from his few surviving
papers and from those of other members of his family in three collections at the FDRL
the Roosevelt Family Papers, the Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children,
and the "Rosedale Papers," available only on microfilm. The most important single
source is the lively journal kept by Mr. James's fond first wife, Rebecca Howland
Roosevelt, also among the Roosevelt Family Papers at the FDRL.

The story of the Roosevelts' purchase of the house that became Springwood is
drawn from Rebecca's journal, plus Olin Dows, Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park; Clara
and Hardy Steelholm, The House at Hyde Park; and George Y, Wilkins' unpublished
Interior Department document, A Report on the Birthplace and Home of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. James Roosevelt's comparison of the house's profile to a train comes
from FDR's own unpublished memorandum, Notes on Hyde Park, FDRL.

The genealogy of the Roosevelts has been explored in at least four books. The two
best are Karl Shriftgiesser, The Amazing Roosevelt Family: 1603-1942, and Nathan
Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles. My brief account is based on them, as well as FDR:
The Beckoning of Destiny by Kenneth S. Davis, the Roosevelt biographer who has

Source Notes 349

devoted the most shrewd and thorough attention to his subject's antecedents. I am also
grateful to the genealogist, Timothy Beard, who kindly shared with me some of his
findings about the family.

The customs and attitudes of Knickerbocker society are admirably described in
Douglas T. Miller, facksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830-
1860, and I have relied heavily upon it and to a lesser extent upon Dixon Wecter,
The Saga of American Society. The small scale of New York society in 1830 is described
by Joseph A. Scoville on page 9 of the first volume of his Old Merchants of New York.
The devotions of family servants are recalled on page 1 3 of Abram C. Dayton's wry
memoir, Last Days of Knickerbocker Society in New York; the description of Knicker
bocker exclusivity is also from Dayton, page 196. Philip Hone's recollection of Isaac
Roosevelt and his forbidding contemporaries is quoted in Miller, page 87. Francis
Grund's encounters with aristocratic scorn for the lower classes and for politics are
all from his elegant book Aristocracy in America, pages 170, 94, and 107.

Isaac Roosevelt's overly charitable brother-in-law is quoted in Steelholm, page 41.
His own view of his son as "unruly" comes from his letter to James, May 14, 1843,
Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL. (Isaac is ostensibly writing here of John Aspinwall
Roosevelt's behavior, not James's, but the allusion is inescapable.)

The story of the Reverend Alvan Hyde and his schoolmaster son Alexander comes
from the reminiscences of townspeople, included in an unusually entertaining compi
lation, The Centennial Celebration and Centennial History of the Town of Lee, Massachu
setts, put together by Alexander Hyde himself (with the Reverend C. M. Hyde) in
1877. Dr. Isaac's querulous letters to James and to Alexander Hyde are among the
Roosevelt Family Papers at the FDRL.

Life at the Collegiate School at Poughkeepsie is described in Steelholm, pages
41-42. But that account has here been supplemented with fresh facts found in the
Poughkeepsie Eagle anniversary edition, June 1911, and in the College Hill Mercury,
the school's literary magazine published from June 30, 1850, to October 1852, and
found at the NYHS.

Mr. James's difficulties at the University of New York (now NYU) come from its
archives and were found for me through the kindness of the archivist, Bayrd Still.

My account of Union College and its president comes largely from Codman
Hislop, Eliphalet Nott. The unpublished My Personal Reminiscences by Silas Burt at
the NYHS and Frederick H. Seward's Reminiscences of a Wartime Statesman and
Diplomat provided anecdotes about student pranks, Nott's charity toward miscreants,
and his reputation for financial slipperiness. Details of campus life were also drawn
from George F. Howe, Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics, and
Thomas C. Reeves's excellent biography, Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan
Arthur.

The shadowy story of James Roosevelt's Grand Tour has been pieced together
from his father's and stepmother's letters and from his 1847 passport, all at the FDRL.

Franklin Roosevelt's account of his father's meeting with Sam Houston is given
in a letter to Adolph Schwarz, March 18, 1935, in PPF 2324, FDRL.

Mr. James's decision to abandon the law for business comes from his own autobio
graphical "Summary of My Life," scrawled in pencil, Roosevelt Family Papers,
FDRL. His business career is briefly sketched in most biographies of his son, but is
most fully developed in Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny pages 28-29.

350 SOURCE NOTES

The honeymoon breakfast at Niagara Falls is recalled in a letter written to John
at the time of his marriage in 1867, "Rosedale Papers," FDRL. My account of the
Roosevelts' subsequent trip to London is based upon my interpretation of an FDR
letter to the historian Roy F. Nichols, PPF 3012, FDRL. Buchanan's clothing crisis
is recounted in James MacGregor Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty, and in George T.
Curtis, Life of Buchanan, Volume I.

The details of Rosy's boyhood at Mount Hope are all drawn from James's letters
to John Roosevelt, written in 1864, "Rosedale Papers," FDRL. The 1861 photograph
of father and son is also at the FDRL.

The official family version of James Roosevelt's wartime career is given in a short
biographical entry belatedly prepared for the National Cyclopedia of American Biogra
phy and reviewed by the President in 1935. James's letter offering counsel to John on
enlistment was written on March 16, 1864, Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the
Children, FDRL. The chagrin Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., felt at having failed to fight
is fully documented in David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, pages 56-61.

The statistics on American tourism before the Civil War are from Foster Rhea
Dulles, Americans Abroad, pages 44 and 83. The Scotia passenger list was published
in the New York Times, May 18, 1865. My account of August Belmont is drawn largely
from David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont, and from
the Dictionary of American Biography. The DAB also supplied the details for the brief
portrait of Captain Charles Marshall and the fact that Andrew Carnegie delighted in
small talk and Burns's poetry. Carnegie's mission in England is outlined in Harold C.
Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, pages 80-81.

My account of the Roosevelts' long sojourn abroad has been compiled from three
interrelated sources: Rebecca's journals, James Roosevelt's letters to John, and Rosy's
schoolboy diary, all at the FDRL. My understanding of the Rebecca Roosevelt jour
nals was greatly enhanced by the shoe-box index to its busy, shifting cast of characters,
prepared by the late George Roach and supplied to me by the library staff; it is a great
pity that Mr. Roach did not live to publish the annotated version of the journals he
had planned.

James's theory about the Mount Hope fire is from FDR's memorandum "History
of the President's Estate at Hyde Park With Anecdotes," FDRL.

General McClellan's musings are all drawn from his unpublished letters of the
period, George Brinton McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

Nathaniel Parker Willis's rapturous description of the Hudson at Hyde Park is
from his book, American Scenery, and appears on page 266 of The Hudson River in
Literature: An Anthology, edited by Arthur G. Adams. The ruminations about English
aristocrats by William Hickling Prescott are included in Transatlantic Crossing, edited
by Walter Allen, pages 69-71.

The population of Hyde Park is given in Change in Hyde Park, a senior thesis at
Vassar College, written by Nancy Fogel, FDRL.

The idyllic details of life there are all from Rebecca's journal; so is the fact that
Springwood was once Brierstone. The description of Leland Stanford's visit to
Springwood was given by FDR in his "History of the President's Estate," FDRL. The
story of Mr. James's early-morning arrival at Hyde Park comes from a letter he wrote
to Anna Roosevelt, March 31, 1878, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Harvard.

The story of Mr. James's one-sided romance with Anna Roosevelt was first told

Source Notes 351

to me by her son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr. I found corroboration for it in a series of
letters from Mr. James to Bamie in the Theodore Roosevelt Papers in the Houghton
Library at Harvard. My description of Bamie's illness and character come from
McCullough, pages 33-35. Mittie Roosevelt's remark about Mr. James's first impres
sion of Sara Delano first appears without attribution in Rita Halle Kleeman's Gracious
Lady, page 101; it must have come from Sara Delano Roosevelt herself.

2: ALGONAC

Sara Delano Roosevelt's early life is outlined in most biographies of her son. But she
is also the subject of a lively biography of her own, Gracious Lady: The Life oj Sara
Delano Roosevelt, written during her lifetime by her friend Rita Halle Kleeman and
published in 193 5. It is a fond portrait, invariably tactful but filled with vivid and useful
detail, most of it provided by Mrs. Roosevelt herself. The text was reviewed for
indiscretions by the President's daughter, Anna, before it was published. Few were
found. Its surprising conclusionthat Sara Delano Roosevelt "has no personal vanity
at a ii" was allowed to stand.

Mrs. Kleeman's notes for the book and for two completed but unpublished maga
zine articles on Mrs. Roosevelt's final years have been deposited with her papers at the
FDRL. These include typed transcripts of interviews with Mrs. Roosevelt, her friends,
and members of her family; notes on her visits to Algonac and Fairhaven; and a small
stenographer's pad filled with scribbled verbatim remarks garnered on visits to Mrs.
Roosevelt in her last days. In writing this and subsequent chapters I have drawn
heavily on this collection for memories more frank and revealing than those Mrs.
Kleeman finally chose to use.

The House at Hyde Park, written by Clara and Hardy Steelholm and published in
1950, is useful for details of life at Aigonac as well as Springwood.

The Delanos themselves, however, were their own best historians. They thought
themselves important and they seem to have kept everything. The Algonac diaries,
which cover the years 1872-1894, are an indispensable guide to daily happenings
within the family. In addition, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Delano
family letters and memorabilia scattered among several collections at the FDRL the
Roosevelt Family Papers, Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children, Delano
Family Papers, and the Papers of Frederic A. Delano.

Frederic A. Delano, Sara's youngest brother, was the Delanos' unofficial chronicler
and his several nostalgic pamphlets written for members of the family provide both
remarkably reliable history and a sensitive gauge of what the Delanos thought of
themselves. Any writer on the Roosevelts and their background is in his debt

Sara Delano's delight in her own good looks and those of her son are recorded in
many places, including Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles. Her ability still to
dazzle at eighty-six is evident in newsreel #201-3105-4 at the FDRL. The story of
her flower arranging during her first visit to Springwood was told by her daughter-in-
law Eleanor Roosevelt, and comes from a transcript of her recorded walking tour of
Springwood, FDRL. Sara Roosevelt's pleasure at the memory of that visit is expressed
in a letter to FDR, May 8, 1932, Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.

The story of Warren Delano's butter brick comes from Kleeman, page 31; his
father established the custom and a newspaper clipping attesting to fat's effectiveness

352 SOURCE NOTES

against TB pasted into one of the Algonac diaries implies that this was the rationale
and that the practice was continued at Newburgh. Mr. Delano's firm views on religion,
labor, and suitors and his surprise at Sara's engagement to Mr. James were all confided
in letters to his son, Warren III, DFP, FDRL.

Elliott Roosevelt's irreverent view of Mr. James as a suitor is quoted in Joseph Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin, page 1 14.

Mr. James's somewhat prickly exchange of letters with Bamie Roosevelt is in the
Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard.

The early history of the Delano clan is set forth in Daniel W. Delano, Jr., Franklin
Roosevelt and the Delano Influence. It is an odd book, more colorful than most genealo
gies but often unreliable and defensive, especially when dealing with unflattering
events.

Warren Delano I described his own seafaring days to his son Edward in 1849,
Delano Family Papers, FDRL.

The full story of Warren Delano's career in the China trade has not yet been
written. My account is pieced together from a variety of sources. Some of his letters
from China are among the DFP, FDRL; others having to do with his business dealings
are with the papers of Russell and Company at the Baker Business Library at Harvard
and among the papers of several members of the Forbes and Low families at the
Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

Warren's younger brother Edward kept a diary during his years in Canton, and
excerpts from it are published here for the first time; DFP, FDRL, Warren Delano's
great-great-grandson, Frederic D. Grant, Jr., first suggested that I consult these. His
Bates College history honors thesis, Edward Delano and Warren Delano II: Case Studies
in American China Trader Attitudes Toward the Chinese, 1834-1844 (1976) ably explores
the minds of his ancestors, and I am grateful to him for sharing both his notes and
his counsel with me.

Warren Delano is mentioned briefly in at least three firsthand accounts of the
Canton trade: William C. Hunter's two gusty memoirs, The Fan Kwae of Old Canton
and Bits of Old China, and Robert Bennet Forbes's Personal Reminiscences. He also
appears in passing in Helen Augur, Tall Ships to Cathay; Maurice Collis, Foreign Mud;
and Elma Loimes, The China Trade Post-Bag of the Seth Low Family of Salem and New
York.

The part played by Americans in the opium business is perhaps most lucidly
described in Jacques M. Downs, "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade,
1800-1840," The Business History Review, Volume XLII, Number 4 (Winter 1968).
Professor Downs is soon to publish a full-scale study of the Americans at Canton
which will include brief profiles of all the traders. He kindly allowed me to consult
his sketch of Warren Delano's career in advance of publication.

My portrait of Canton, the China trade, and the Opium War as Warren Delano
experienced them has been compiled from a number of books, including Foster Rhea
Dulles, The Old China Trade and China and America; Arthur Cunnyngham, The Opium
War; John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast; and Osmond
Tiffany, Jr., The Canton Chinese.

My account of Houqua's "chopstick dinner" comes from Augur, pages 38-39 and
Edward Delano's diary. William Hunter's blissful memories of old Canton come from
page 3 of Bits of Old China. Robert Forbes's justification of the opium business may

Source Notes 353

be found on pages 144-145 of his autobiography; his woeful cooking is described on
page 147.

Details for my profiles of Judge Joseph Lyman and his wife and Catherine Lyman
Delano's first impressions of China come from Memoir of the Life of Mrs. Anne Jean
Lyman by her daughter, Mrs. Susan Lesley. The newlywed Delanos' novel dinner
eaten off the Cape of Good Hope is described in Forbes, page 167, and substantiated
by Edward Delano's diary.

Details of Warren Delano's domestic business career are from Frederic Delano's
unpublished 1928 sketch of his father's life and from his pamphlet Algonac, both
among his papers at the FDRL. Additional facts come from an 1877 letter written to
the New Bedford Standard, author unknown, DFP, FDRL.

Colonnade Row is described in Kleeman, pages 14-16, and attributed there to Seth
Geer. The architectural historian Paul Goldberger has more recently credited the firm
of Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis in his The City Observed, and I have
followed his lead.

Warren Delano's longing for a country home of his own is described in Frederic
Delano's Algonac, as are many details about the house and grounds. Kleeman, Steel-
holm, and the Algonac diaries provided more.

The use of the word "Algonac" as a Roosevelt code word for good news is
described in FDR: Personal Letters, 1905-1928, pages 4-5.

My description of Andrew Jackson Downing is drawn from several sources,
including his own The Architecture of Country Houses, Joseph Kastner's lively profile
in Notable American Architects, Carl Carmer's The Hudson, and Steelholm.

Warren Delano's fondness for Oriental furnishings is described in Kleeman and
Steelholm, amplified here by an examination of photographs at the FDRL.

Captain Warren Delano's pleasure at the simplicity of Sara's name is in Steelholm,
page 8. Eight-year-old Dora is quoted in Kleeman, page 24. Kleeman's notes are the
source of Sara's memories of her mother and father; her parents' aversion to American
hotels and to her step-grandmother; details of clannishness at Fairhaven and her own
speculations about its causes; her tribute to her father and to his "patriarchal spirit."
Her sister Dora's views on Delano family loyalty come from Kleeman's notes of a
separate interview with her.

Warren Delano's homily about the weather is from a 1938 compilation of Eleanor
Roosevelt's My Day columns.

Edward Delano's scorn for his brother's plan to recoup his losses by returning to
China in 1860 is from a letter he wrote to John Delano, DFP, FDRL. Frederic Delano
described his mother's "firmness of purpose" in his Algonac, FDRL. Kleeman gives
details of Algonac life without father. Sara's tribute to him is from her unpublished
notes. Warren Delano's second stay in China is touched upon in Kwang-Ching Liu,
Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China: 1862-1874.

My account of the family voyage to Hong Kong aboard the Surprise is drawn from
Catherine Delano's meticulous log, discovered by her son Fred in 1928, Frederic A.
Delano Papers, FDRL. Sara's reunion with her father was recounted to Kleeman and
appears in her book, page 59.

Life at Rose Hill is described in Kleeman and Steelholm, supplemented here by
an examination of photographs at the FDRL, especially those in the family albums of
Dora Forbes and Annie Hitch. The opium record book, with its incongruous chil-

3 54 SOURCENOTES

dren's drawings still in place, is among the Delano Family Papers, FDRL; as are Sara's
letters about her father's toilette; the Chinese scramble of 1877; and her joy at the Civil
War's end.

The Delano sisters' sibling jousts are described in Kleeman, here supplemented by
excerpts from the Algonac diaries, Kleeman's notes of an interview with a girlhood
friend, and Sara's own letter to Warren on the birth of his son in 1877.

Warren Delano's admonitions to his son Warren III are among his letters, DFP,
FDRL. That son's high collegiate spirits are amusingly described by his brother Fred
in a privately printed tribute, Warren Delano III, delivered at his memorial service in
1920.

The story of Warren Ill's difficult courtship of Jennie Walters is outlined in Daniel
Delano's family history, but has been amplified here with excerpts from the Algonac
diaries and from Warren IPs letters to his son, Delano Family Papers, FDRL.

My portrait of Stanford White as a boisterous young man is based upon Charles
C. Baldwin, Stanford White, and several chatty letters written by his worshipful bride
on their honeymoon in 1884, Stanford White Papers, New- York Historical Society.
White's grandson Peter told me of his grandfather's early escapades with Boston
women.

Details of the Roosevelt-Delano wedding come from the New York World, as
reproduced in Kleeman, Steelholm, and Davis. Elizabeth Hissop, the wedding guest
who remembered the tearful women at the wedding, was interviewed by Kleeman in
the early 1930s.

The newlyweds' journey to Springwood is described in Kleeman, Steelholm, and
Davis, here supplemented by details from the Algonac diary, FDRL. Ellen Roosevelt
is quoted as to her Aunt Sally's beauty in Kleeman, page 111.

Warren Delano's indignation at the political disloyalty of his Irish servants and his
report of Sara's sadness at leaving home are both from letters to his son, Warren,
Delano Family Papers, FDRL.

Details of the Roosevelt honeymoon abroad were all found in Sara Delano Roose
velt's journal, FDRL.

My brief account of Philippe Delano, his death, and Sara's reaction to it are from
the Kleeman notes, the Algonac diaries, Philippe's own amusing writings, and Sara's
journal, all at the FDRL.

3: THE VERY NICE CHILD

Franklin Roosevelt's boyhood has received little attention from his biographers, in part
because many family papers have only recently been opened but also, I believe, because
its serene surface seems to yield so few telling incidents. I have returned to primary
sources for the most part in developing my own account. But there are four very
different works that have proved especially helpful, and I am indebted to the authors
of all four.

Kenneth S. Davis in the early chapters of FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny gives the
fullest previous portrait of the period, as well as a useful and provocative assessment
of its meaning to Roosevelt's later development.

Dr. Nona S. Ferdon's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Psycholog
ical Interpretation of His Childhood and Youth, seeks to apply the theoretical framework

Source Notes 355

developed by Erik Erikson to FDR's formative years; this book would have been much
harder to write without her pioneering research into early documents and her subse
quent generous advice to the author.

Perhaps the most audacious investigator of Roosevelt's youth is Bernard A. Asbell,
whose shrewd, intriguing book, The FDR Memoirs, deserves a far wider audience than
it has received.

Finally, Robert Coles's Privileged Ones deals with rich children in our time, not
Roosevelt's, but it is filled with sensitive insights into the obvious advantages and
subtler disadvantages money and family confer upon the children of the wealthy; my
interpretation of their impact on Franklin Roosevelt owes much to him.

This and the following chapter also draw heavily upon My Boy Franklin by Sara
Delano Roosevelt, as told to Isabel Leighton and Gabrielle Forbush. The curious
publishing history of this book will be given in my second volume; there is nothing
remotely like it in presidential literature.

Franklin Roosevelt's memories of Hyde Park as "the center of the world" are from
his untitled and unpublished reminiscences, dictated in the White House at an un
known date and never completed, FDRL.

My account of his difficult birth draws heavily upon Kenneth Davis, FDR: The
Beckoning of Destiny, pages 51-52, and Sara Delano Roosevelt's diary, FDRL.

Mrs. Roosevelt's warm memories of her infant son are from My Boy Franklin; her
approval of Helen McRorie is from her diary, FDRL. Winston ChruchiU's tribute to
his nurse is quoted in William Manchester, The Last Lion, page 116.

Warren Delano's delight in his grandson and his dashed hope that the baby might
be named for him are from letters to his son Warren III and his brother Franklin,
Delano Family Papers, FDRL. Sara's own disappointment at having to name her boy
for someone else is noted in her diary, FDRL.

The story of FDR (and only FDR) being allowed to sleep in the ancestral Delano
cradle is from the Kleeman notes, FDRL.

Dora Forbes's remark about "a beautiful frame" first appeared in Kleeman, page
170.

SDR's progress reports on the baby are all from Kleeman and from her own
journals, FDRL, as are the stories of his poignant reactions to his parents' rare ab
sences. Mittie Roosevelt's account of her quiet weekend at Springwood is from a letter
to Elliott, among the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

Roosevelt's own memories of his close call aboard the Germania are given in several
places, but appeared first in Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in
Progressive Democracy. His mother's version, quoted here, is from Kleeman, pages
152-153. Additional details come from newspaper clippings describing the near disas
ter pinned into the Algonac diaries, FDRL.

FDR's fumbling with a cigarette and the memory it triggered are from the Press
Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume I, December 14, 1933. James Roosevelt's
theorizing about his father's "dread of fire" is from My Parents: A Differing View, page
8 1 . Warren Delano's fondness for his daughter Laura and the story of her ghastly death
come from the Algonac diaries, and from letters to Warren Delano III, written by his
father and by SDR, Delano Family Papers, FDRL.

356 SOURCE NOTES

The photographs of FDR with his aunt, with his father, and at the wheel of the
Roosevelt yacht are all at the FDRL.

SDR's version of the relationship between her son and her husband is from My
Boy Franklin, pages 20-21. Mr. James's tobogganing mishap is noted in SDR's diary,
FDRL. Roosevelt's own memories of the Blizzard of '88 are recorded in his unpub
lished and incomplete "History of the President's Estate at Hyde Park, N.Y., With
Anecdotes," FDRL. The story of Mr. James and the old woman who believed herself
Queen Victoria was told by FDR to the graduating class of nurses at the Hudson River
State Hospital in 1937, and is quoted in Steelholm, page 99.

FDR's bout with typhoid fever is outlined in Sara's journal, FDRL.

SDR's cheerful account of life in Washington in the winter of 1887 is from her
diary, FDRL. Her son's visit to the Cleveland White House is here drawn from the
version in Kleeman, pages 145-146. His mother's lifelong goal for her son is given on
page 4 of My Boy Franklin.

Mrs. Moschele's letter on the elder Roosevelt's fondness for one another was
written to Elliott Roosevelt, FDRL.

Roosevelt's joy at being allowed to bathe himself is from his letter to his father,
FDR: His Personal Letters: Early Years (Volume I), page 16. His mother's resolve to
keep her son's mind on "nice things"; her discussion of an allowance and of his
reading; the virtues of being an only child; the story of his scary defiance aboard the
Germania; her efforts at discipline; and his one-day genteel rebellion, all come from
My Boy Franklin. The Englishman who admired the young Roosevelt's manners was
named Hulten; his daughter, the Honorable Mrs. Richard Bethels, wrote to remind
FDR of it in 1939, PPF 6329, FDRL.

The life of James Roosevelt Roosevelt is largely uncharted territory. My account
of his gaudy arrival at Hyde Park in the spring of 1884 is based upon one of the
newspaper clippings he stored in the series of elaborately monogrammed scrapbooks
he never quite got around to arranging, FDRL. Further details are drawn from an
account of the trip from New York recorded in Reginald W. Rives, The Coaching Club:
Its History, Records and Activities. (It is my assumption that FDR and his mother
walked next door to see the coach drive up; they were at home at the time, Mr. James
was aboard as a passenger, and it's hard to imagine that they would not have made
the effort.)

Eleanor Roosevelt called Rosy "a terrible snob" in her interview with Louis Eisner,
FDRL.

My account of the early Astors, of the Mrs. Astor, and of her courtier, Ward
McAllister, is drawn from several sources, including Virginia Cowles, The Astors;
Lucy Kavaler, The Astors: An American Legend; Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American
Society; and Kate Simon, Fifth Aven ue: A Very Social History. The photograph of Rosy
in full Versailles splendor is at the FDRL; his mother's pleasure at how he looked may
be found in the Rebecca Howland Roosevelt diary, FDRL.

W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., recalled for me Rosy's great charm and somewhat casual
attitude toward office work. The description of the finery worn at the Roosevelt- Astor
wedding is from a clipping found among Rosy's papers, FDRL; the description of the
work of the Downtown Relief Bureau comes from another.

My survey of Rosy's expensive and obsessive hobby is based upon a number of
sources, including Reginald Rives's club history, cited above; Fairman Rogers, Manual

Source Notes 357

of Coaching; "An Old Whip," The Delights of Coaching; Frank Kintrea, "When the
Coachman Was a Millionaire," American Heritage, XVIII, Number 6, October 1967;
Clarence Gohdes, "Driving a Drag in Old New York," Bulletin of the New York Public
Library, June 1962. Rosy's own coaching activities are recorded in Rives, and in the
many crumbling clippings in his personal albums.

My account of his first diplomatic experience is drawn from his scrapbooks and
from his letter copybooks, FDRL.

The Thanksgiving tableau presented at Springwood by the three Roosevelt chil
dren is described in Kleeman, pages 178-79. Early signs of Taddy's troubles may be
found in the copybooks kept by Rosy, FDRL. The tutor's remarks and Rosy's own
worries are from copies of his letters to Endicott Peabody of Groton. Alice Roosevelt
described the hair-pulling in a letter to FDR in 1898, FDRL.

My discussion of the River families draws heavily upon F. Kennon Moody's
unpublished Ph.D. thesis, FDR and His Neighbors, FDRL. FDR spoke of the peripa
tetic gourmand Henry Madison while waiting for a press conference to begin on
January 12, 1940. My account of his wanderings is supplemented by a newspaper
clipping about him, found in a scrapbook kept by FDR's uncle, John A. Roosevelt,
FDRL.

Anna Roosevelt's remark about FDR's childhood choice of playmates is from
Asbell, The FDR Memoirs. Roosevelt's early letter to Archie Rogers is from FDR: His
Personal Letters: The Early Years (Volume I), page 12. His mother's severe view of
overnight visitors is from a 1917 letter to her son, FDRL. The story of the Whitney
sisters was kindly sent to me by their cousin, Dawn Langley Simmons, of Hudson,
New York. FDR's air of command while telling the servants' children what to do is
described in My Boy Franklin, page 26.

Details of life for the children of Hyde Park and the stories of the boys who
bobsledded and hunted snakes at Springwood were gleaned from listening to tape-
recorded interviews with their descendants, made by Nancy Fogel and available at the
FDRL. The story of the rabbits FDR took home to Springwood is found in PPF 5058,
FDRL.

The Royal sleigh in which the Roosevelts rode may still be seen in the Springwood
barn.

4: THE LOVING CONSPIRACY

My account of Mr. James's initial illness is drawn from Sara's journal, FDRL; the
menu for a typical hunt breakfast at Springwood is from Steelholm, page 97.

Life at Nauheim and other German spas in the 1890s is described in Edward
Gutman, The Watering Places and Mineral Springs of Germany, Austria and Switzerland
. . . A Popular Medical Guide (New York, 1880); Karl Baedeker, Northern Germany:
A Handbook for Travelers (Leipzig, 1904); Louise Chandler Moulton, Lazy Tours in
Spain and Elsewhere (Boston, 1896); Photo-Club Bad Nauheim, Das Scbone Bad Nau
heim (Bad Nauheim, 1956); E. S. Turner, Taking the Cure (London, 1967); Vivien and
Charles Graves, Enjoy Life Longer (London, 1970).

The Roosevelts' experiences at Nauheim are given in Sara's journals and in Klee
man, pages 160-162. FDR's own terse memories of his first summer there and of his
encounters with the little English invalid may be found in PPF 5612, FDRL. His

358 SOURCE NOTES

Spartan swimming lessons are mentioned in SDK's journal and more fully described
in Roosevelt and Shalett, page 48. Herr Bommerscheim's nostalgic encomium to his
American pupil is quoted in Davis, page 76; his contemporaneous progress report to
Sara and Mr. James, FDRL, was kindly translated for me by the late Adolf Samet.
Sara's scorn for the Germans is described in a letter to Franklin from Mr. James
written June 9, 1897, Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children, FDRL; he
is describing a brief sojourn for an "after-cure" at Baden Baden, not Nauheim, but
English visitors did dine by themselves at Nauheim, and the Roosevelts ate with their
friends.

The comings and goings of Franklin's governesses and tutors are noted in Sara's
journals, FDRL, and so are his "Sunday headaches" and crippling "bobos." The story
of the intrusive Miss Gerver and of Franklin's reluctance to express his genuine
feelings about her is told in My Boy Franklin, pages 23-24, augmented here by Sara's
journal, FDRL. A journalist named Constance Drexel tracked down Mademoiselle
Sandoz in Belgium in 1933, and a number of the incidents I have included about her
are from Drexei's "Unpublished Letters of FDR," Parents' Magazine, XXVI, Septem
ber 1951. (This article must be used with care, however, since several of the scenes
described as having been witnessed by Mademoiselle Sandoz actually took place some
years before she was employed by the family.) Mademoiselle Sandoz's first report to
Franklin's parents is at the FDRL, along with a number of his exercise books and his
essay on ancient Egypt. Sara's chagrin at her son's callousness toward his teacher's
injuries are in her diary. The story of the unfortunate Miss Reinsberg is told in William
Hassett, Off the Record with FDR, page 9.

Sara lectured her son on his obligations to those less fortunate than he in a letter
written in 1917, FDRL. The Delanos' local largesse is acknowledged in a newspaper
clipping pinned into the Algonac diaries, FDRL. Details of Annie Hitch's formidable
career as a Newburgh benefactress are detailed in various clippings gathered by Sara
at the time of her sister's death, FDRL. Sara's memory of Booker T. Washington's
visit to Algonac is from the Kleeman notes, FDRL. Mr. James's address on "Work"
is also at the FDRL.

FDR's boyhood discovery of Methodism is given in Dows, page 109; his favorite
hymn is given on a list of "Personal Data Regarding President Roosevelt" kept by his
White House secretaries, PPF 1A, FDRL. Eleanor Roosevelt recalled her religious
discussion with FDR in This Is My Story, pages 149-150.

The story of the FDR Library is given in Bernard A. Weisberger's article on
presidential libraries, "The Paper Trust," American Heritage magazine, April 1971.
John T. Flynn's pharaonic comparison is from The Roosevelt Myth, page 278. FDR's
own rueful description of himself as an insatiable collector is from an after-dinner
speech he delivered before a Washington gathering of the Library's newly appointed
trustees, February 4, 1939, FDRL.

Admiral Mclntire's estimate of the number of hours FDR spent with his stamps
is on pages 78-79 of his White House Physician. My account of the astonishing scope
of Roosevelt's collections is gleaned from William J. Stewart and Charyll C, Pollard,
"Franklin D. Roosevelt, Collector," Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives,
Winter 1969, pages 13-28, and from a helpful talk with Marguerite Hubbard, current
curator of the collections at Hyde Park.

The ship drawings from his first letter are reproduced in FDR: His Personal Letters:

Source Notes 359

Early Years. Sara's claim that she alone fostered her son's love of the sea is registered
in My Boy Franklin, page 7; her account of reading aloud to him appears on page 34;
the precious contents of his sea chest are given on page 30. FDR's own account of his
grandfather's logbooks is from his introduction to Whalesbips of New Bedford by
Clifford W. Ashley (Boston, 1929). The small girl who remembered FDR's absorption
in a robin's egg was Leonora Sill Ashton, daughter of the rector of St. James; my
account is drawn from her article "Bird Lover of Hyde Park," that appeared in
Audubon magazine in June, 1955.

FDR's childish essay "Guns and Squirrels" is at the FDRL; so is his bird-shooting
tally. The tale of his assurance that his prey would wait for him to come and shoot
it is told on pages 15-16 of My Boy Franklin; his independent journey to see the
Foljambe birds is from the same source, page 17. "Spring Song," the overwritten essay
which he appears to have plagiarized, is from the May 11, 1896, number of The
Foursome, FDRL.

Mrs. Charles Hamlin's charming "Some Memories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt"
is at the FDRL. Roosevelt's own memory of election night 1892 was given on election
night 1944. Mr. James's pleasure at Grover Cleveland's victory and the music and
musicians that heralded it alF come from a letter to FDR, written by an eyewitness,
an old Hyde Park Democrat named D. E. Howatt, in 1935, PPF 8, FDRL.

Rosy's own copybooks and scrapbooks provided most of the material for my
account of his second diplomatic posting, the death of his wife, and his troubles with
the education of Taddy. A copy of General Lawton's somewhat limited tribute to his
abilities is among Rosy's papers. Sara's account of Helen's death and Mr. James's
aggrieved reaction to the way Rosy treated him are found in her journal, FDRL. The
story of Bamie's hope to wed Rosy and of her belated discovery of Betty Riley, Rosy's
genteel mistress, was told to me by Bamie's son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr. Rosy's
embarrassing failure to enlarge his children's Astor allowance was described in all the
New York dailies of the time.

My brief profile of Endicott Peabody is drawn from Peabody of Groton by Frank
D. Ashburn (New York, 1944) and from Frank Kintrea's " 'Old Peabo' and the
School," American Heritage, October 1980. Rosy's letter to Peabody is among the
Endicott Peabody Papers at Groton School as are Mr. James's letters to him about
a gentlemanly tutor for Franklin. The story of FDR's desire to go to Annapolis is
recounted by Eleanor Roosevelt in This Is My Story, page 122, and was confided to
Ernest K. Lindley as well: Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy,
page 5.

Arthur Dumper's impression of Sara and his bafflement at FDR's idiosyncratic
study habits were recalled for me by his son, Sargent Dumper.

Warren Delano's pleasure in the Chicago World's Fair is described in Frederic A.
Delano's memoir of his mother and father, Delano Family Papers, FDRL. Catherine
Delano's birthday note is there, too, and so are her sister Susan Lyman Lesley's
memories of Mrs. Delano's last days.

My account of Franklin's final preschool European journey is taken from Lindley,
pages 50-51; Kleeman, pages 164-165; My Boy Franklin, page 23. His trip to Bayreuth
and his parting with his parents are from My Boy Franklin, page 36, SDR's letter to
Dora Forbes, and from Sara's journal, both FDRL.

360 SOURCE NOTES

5: GETTING ON VERY WELL WITH THE FELLOWS

My picture of Groton is drawn from Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton and Fifty
Years On: Groton School, 1884-1934; Francis Biddle, A Casual Past; George Biddle,
An American Artist's Story; William Amory Gardner, Groton Myths and Memories;
Frank Kintrea, " 'Old Peabo' and the School," American Heritage, October /Novem
ber 1980; George W. Martin, "Preface to a Schoolmaster's Biography," Harper's,
February 1944; Ellery Sedgwick, The Happy Profession, plus the school newspaper, the
Grotonian, for the years FDR was in attendance.

All of Franklin's voluminous letters home are reproduced in Elliott Roosevelt, ed.,
FDR: His Personal Letters: Early Years. His parents' letters to him are at the FDRL,
among the Roosevelt Family Papers Donated by the Children.

The description of the dark woodwork is from Ashburn's Peabody, page 92.
Francis Biddle recalled the special misery of the boy who found the carpetless stairs
so disheartening (page 186). Sherrard Billings was the master who described the
relentless busyness of the Groton boy's day, quoted on page 95 of Ashburn's Peabody.
Peabody's own stern views on "loafing" and how to combat it are quoted from
Kintrea, page 98.

Francis Biddle is the source for the special terrors for new boys of the communal
washroom (page 186). Sara Delano Roosevelt noted Mr. James's pleasure in Franklin's
good academic standing in her journal. Peabody's recollections of Franklin's Groton
career were written in 1932 to a graduate whose name is not given, and appear on page
341 of Ashburn's Peabody.

The story of the rector and the bookish newcomer is from Joseph Alsop, FDR: A
Centenary Remembrance, page 35, as is FDR's confession that something went a sadly
wrong" at Groton. Roosevelt is quoted as having felt "hopelessly out of things" in
John Gunther's Roosevelt in Retrospect (page 178), bolstered by George Biddle (page
58). Eleanor Roosevelt's memory of having been told by FDR that he had always been
an "outsider" is from This I Remember, page 43.

The former classmate who recalled Taddy as a "queer sort of boy" was James L.
Goodwin, who entered the third form with Franklin in 1896. Another classmate, Dr.
Edward Bell Krumbhaar, a Philadelphia physician and teacher, told Stefan Lorant of
the hazing FDR endured; the story appears among the author's notes for his FDR: A
Pictorial Biography, page 154.

George Biddle tells the pathetic story of his own aborted closeness to his brother,
page 60. His brother Francis described pumping and his own participation in A Casual
Past, pages 171-173.

Ashburn explains Peabody's fondness for football on page 101 of his Peabody; the
rector's own tribute to the game as a training ground for life is from a 1909 letter to
Walter Camp, reproduced on page 195 of the same book.

Franklin's misleading memory of his boxing prowess comes from an interview in
the New York Globe, June 2, 1911, FDRL. His fabricated football injuries come from
the Henry Morgenthau diary for July 26, 1939. (The latter story was kindly pointed
out to me by Professor Frank Freidel.)

The former student who remembered Sherrard Billings' insistence on good form
in all things is quoted on page 108 of Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny. The
brilliant rambling of William Amory Gardner in the classroom and his desktop dance

Source Notes 361

were recalled by a nameless graduate and appear on page 158 of Ashburn's Peabody.
Gardner's idiosyncratic creed for good teaching is given on page 109 of Davis.

FDR's 1934 tribute to his old headmaster is from the New York Times, June 3, 1934,
and is quoted here from Freidel, page 35. W. Averell Harriman's iconoclastic remark
about the rector is quoted in Davis, page 107. George Biddle's icy assessment appears
on page 67 of his autobiography. George Martin's article provided the rector's stern
views of the stage, and Francis Biddle recalled his ferocity about impurity of every
kind on page 179 of A Casual Past. Peabody 's assurance about the reality of immortal
ity is quoted in Kintrea, page 100. His equally strong self-confidence about his own
decisions is from Davis, page 111.

The rector's hope that his boys would go forth to purify politics is from a letter
written to an unnamed friend in 1894, and is quoted here from Ashburn's Peabody,
pages 112-113. TR's own views of a Groton boy's special responsibilities are from his
address to the seniors of 1904 in the same book, pages 176-177.

Mary Newbold Morgan's memories of Taddy were relayed to me by her son,
Gerald Morgan, Jr., as was his grandmother's theory of the "Astor taint." Taddy's
pathetic letter to Bamie Roosevelt is among the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at Har
vard.

The comparison Franklin's nurse made between him and his Grandfather Delano
appears in Kleeman, page 197.

Endicott Peabody's lukewarm recommendation of Taddy for Harvard is among
the Peabody Papers at Harvard. George Biddle's memories of FDR at Groton are on
page 58 of An American Artist's Story; his brother's are in his In Brief Authority, page
4. Eleanor Roosevelt's impressions of her husband's unhappiness at Groton were
offered to Bess Furman and appear in her Washington By-Line, page 272.

The classmate who remembered FDR's sarcasm at Groton was James L. Goodwin,
who entered Franklin's form two years late, just as he did, and appears on page 34 of
FDR: His Personal Letters: The Early Years. Franklin's fury at the rector for his alleged
favoritism appears here in full for the first time; the letter appears in truncated form
on page 392 of the same volume.

President Roosevelt's fulsome recommendation of the rector for a Cambridge
honorary degree appears in Davis, page 112. The Roosevelt aide who suggested FDR
simply felt sorry for Peabody in his old age was speaking to John Gunther; the
unattributed remark appears on page 174 of Roosevelt in Retrospect. FDR's own tribute
to the rector is from Ashburn's Peabody, page 349. The story of Peabody's Union Club
tribute to FDR and its silent reception comes from George Biddle, An American
Artist's Story, page 67.

The rector's vote for Herbert Hoover in 1932 is recorded in his own words in
Ashburn's Peabody, page 340. FDR, Jr., told me of Peabody's early-morning visit.
Peabody's tribute to New Deal legislation as a shield against radical attacks is on page
345.

William Hassett's assessment of what FDR really thought of the rector is from his
Off the Record with FDR, page 24.

Mrs. Peabody's exuberant welcome for the President is described in Ashburn's
Peabody, page 296. Jeffrey Potter's account of President Roosevelt's visit to Groton
on its fiftieth anniversary and of his father's dire threats and abject surrender are from

362 SOURCE NOTES

his memoir "This Thing About Frank," The New Yorker, Volume 39, Number 25,
August 10, 1963.

6: UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF HIS MOTHER

My account of FDR's Harvard years is drawn largely from his letters to his parents
and his mother's letters to him; from her journals; and from his own terse "Line-A-
Day" college diary; all at the FDRL. I have also relied on the Harvard chapters in
several biographies, but especially Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt;
Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship; and Kenneth S. Davis, The
Beckoning of Destiny.

The story of Helen Roosevelt (Robinson) and her grandmother's jewels is from
the transcript of an interview with her and Mary Newbold (Morgan) conducted by
George Palmer, National Park Service, December 13, 1949.

The story of luckless Taddy, his embarrassing marriage, and the Roosevelts' reac
tion to it is told here from family letters, augmented with details from the New York
Times, Sun, World, and Herald, plus the gossip sheet Town Topics. Deleted passages
in Volume I of FDR's Personal Letters have here been restored.

Family letters and Sara's journals provided the sad details of Mr. James's last days
and death. Rosy's stubborn Locomobile is described in Kleeman, pages 201-202.
Condolence letters upon the death of James Roosevelt as well as caliigraphed tributes
to him may be found among his papers, FDRL. The size of Sara's two legacies and
Franklin's share in them is given in Miller, FDR: An Intimate History, page 36.

Franklin's overenthusiastic essay on his ancestors' democratic tendencies is at the
FDRL. The Byzantine process by which would-be members of Porcellian inched
toward their goal is clearly set forth in Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, pages
135-137, and was kindly supplemented for me by a present-day member of the club
who prefers to remain anonymous. FDR spoke of his bitter disappointment at having
been rejected to W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., who reaffirmed the story to me, Eleanor
Roosevelt's reference to her husband's alleged "inferiority complex" is quoted in
Freidel, page 57. FDR's misadventure with the little Italian boy and his neighbors is
recounted in his own words in Looker, pages 35-38. Lathrop Brown's assessment of
the impact of the Porcellian's rebuff was given to Frank Freidel and appears (anony
mously, at Brown's request) in The Apprenticeship, page 57. The memories of FDR's
Harvard acquaintances Tom Beal and Walter E. Sachs were solicited in their old age
by Richard Thayer Goldberg and appear in his The Making of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
page 12; those of Arthur A. Ballantine and W. Russell Bowie appeared in an article
on FDR's days on the Crimson published in that newspaper; so did FDR's own reasons
for having opposed the shift of the Crimson 's headquarters to the basement of the
Harvard Union. His ease with the printers is described in Lindley, Franklin D.
Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy, page 64.

All of FDR's Crimson editorials may be found at the FDRL.

My account of Franklin's time at Harvard and, especially, of his tenure on the
Crimson has benefited from a careful reading by one of his successors as editor of that
journal, Spencer Klaw, currently the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. I am
grateful to him.

Mrs. Hartman Kuhn's letter offering her Boston home to Sara is among the James

Source Notes 363

Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. Corinne Alsop's memories of FDR as a suitor are offered
in her son Joseph's FDR: A Centenary Remembrance, page 36. Alice Roosevelt's harsher
views are quoted here from Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 103. The girl who
grieved at the news of FDR's engagement was named Minerva Lyman Hannewell,
and her story was told to him by her mother, Mrs. C. A. Lyman of Beverly Farms,
Massachusetts, in a letter written in 1944, PSF 155, FDRL. Eleanor Roosevelt's
memory of how FDR dealt with awkwardness and her friend Helen Wilmerding's
assessment of Sara Roosevelt's relationship with her son are both from Lash, pages 1 1 3
and 116.

Dr. Nona Ferdon discovered four coded messages in FDR's college diary in 1971
and eventually had them deciphered. The process was described in Prologue, Spring
1972. The code appears to have been devised by Franklin himself, perhaps in order
to thwart the curiosity of his intrusive mother. I discovered a fifth entry in 1983.

My discussion of Franklin's relationships with women and his secrecy and misdi
rection about them when writing to his mother owes much to Bernard Asbell's The
FDR Memoirs.

The story of his early relationship with Alice Sohier is detailed here for the first
time. It is based upon study of FDR's Harvard diary and SDR's journal, as well as
conversations with three members of the Sohier family Alice's son, Bramwell Shaw;
her nephew, Dr. William D. Sohier; and especially her granddaughter, Emily Shaw,
who also kindly provided me with the photograph of her grandmother that I have
included among the illustrations. FDR's own brief memory of Alice's beauty is from
a letter he wrote to her father in 1934, acknowledging receipt of a photograph of
himself among the ushers at her 1904 coming-out dance, PPF 1355, FDRL. His
curiously canted memory of his relationship with Alice is from a letter to Robert D.
Washburn, August 18, 1928, FDRL.

7: E IS AN ANGEL

My account of the Fairhaven Thanksgiving at which Franklin so startled his mother
with his plan to marry Eleanor is based upon SDR's journal and the Algonac diaries
(which include Warren Delano's dinner-table toast to the family and mention of that
autumn's plentiful crop of apples); both at the FDRL. Sara's memory of how she took
the news is from Gracious Lady. The reassuring letters to her from Franklin and from
Eleanor appear in the first volume of his Personal Letters, pages 517-518.

Eleanor Roosevelt was almost as open about her own past as her husband was
reticent about his. Her writings include three volumes of autobiography This Is My
Story, This I Remember, and On My Own as well as several other books and a blizzard
of magazine articles and newspaper columns in which the events of her early years
are examined and re-examined. And in Joseph P. Lash she found a biographer who
was both sensitive and encyclopedic. His six volumes about her Eleanor Roosevelt:
A Friend's Memoir; Eleanor and Franklin; Eleanor Roosevelt: The Years Alone; Eleanor
Roosevelt and Her Friends (Volumes I and II); and Life Was Meant to Be Lived are
indispensable to anyone trying to puzzle out the personality of the complex woman
he knew so well.

Corinne Robinson Alsop's terse assessment of Eleanor's childhood comes from an
unpublished interview with her and other members of the Oyster Bay family, con-

364 SOURCE NOTES

ducted in 1954 by Herman and Mary Hagedorn of the Theodore Roosevelt Associa
tion.

Elliott Roosevelt remains an elusive figure. Even the nature of his illnesses remains
a mystery. My portrait of his early years is based largely upon The Rise of Theodore
Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough, Corinne
Robinson's delicate memoir My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, Frances (Smith) Parsons 7
Perchance Some Day, and upon his letters at the FDRL and at Harvard.

Anna Hall is less well known even than her husband. My account of her and her
family draws heavily upon Lash, Eleanor and Franklin and Love, Eleanor. I have also
worked with the Anna Hall Roosevelt Papers at the FDRL. Neither she nor Elliott
always dated their letters, so any account based upon them as mine largely is has
to proceed from internal evidence. The woman friend who described Anna's unique
grace and need for praise was one of three who contributed memorial essays to a little
privately printed volume, In Loving Memory of Anna Hall Roosevelt, at FDRL.

All of Eleanor's own memories of her childhood are here drawn from the first four
chapters of This Is My Story, except where noted. Her account of her first visit to
Franklin in his Springwood nursery is from the book of her father's letters she edited,
Hunting Big Game in the Eighties, pages 36-37; his letter to her in which he urged her
not to chew her fingernails is also from that book. The portrait of "Little Nell Scolding
Elliott" is on display at the FDRL.

My account of the near sinking of the Britannic is based on newspaper stories that
appeared at the time in the New York World, Tribune, Sun, and Times. Mrs. Gracie's
letter about Eleanor's reaction to being left behind by her parents is quoted in Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin, pages 29-30; Anna's concern for her from Europe is quoted
from page 3 1 of the same volume.

Eleanor's views about the crippling impact of fear are from her last book, You Learn
by Living, page 25.

Joseph Lash offers the most complete account of Elliott Roosevelt's slow disinte
gration in Eleanor and Franklin and in Love, Eleanor; and my account draws upon his
but is supplemented by a fresh examination of his letters to Anna, to her mother, and
to others at the FDRL and by a careful reading of Theodore Roosevelt's letters to
Bamie at the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

Eleanor's letter about her brother Elliott's arrival is quoted on page 32 of Eleanor
and Franklin; Tissie Mortimer's letter about Eleanor's anxiety at his absence is on page

Elliott's anger over Eleanor's fearfulness was recalled in her draft of an article for
Look, May 23, 1939, FDRL.

Eleanor's memory of her sad time at the French convent is drawn from This Is My
Story, published in 1937; by the time she composed this account, however, she had
forgotten or repressed the real motive for swallowing the coin: it was the only way
she could think of to be sent back to the family that had left her there. That motive
is included in her earlier account in Hunting Big Game in the Eighties.

The details of Elliott's life at Abingdon, Virginia, are drawn from two newspaper
articles that appeared in a Washington County, Virginia, newspaper, March 4, 1933
(its masthead is missing from the clipping I consulted), and the Richmond Times-
Dispatch, May 24, 1935, as well as from an unpublished manuscript entitled "Roose-
velts in Virginia" by Goodridge Wilson; copies of all four may be found at the FDRL.

Source Notes 365

Edith Carow Roosevelt's suggestion that Eleanor be sent away to school to keep
her out of her father's hands was made in an undated letter to Bamie, Theodore
Roosevelt Collection, Harvard.

Eleanor's glowing tribute to her father as a giver of gifts appears in Hunting Big
Game in the Eighties. The fragment of her composition about the little girl who lost
her father may be found in the "Commonplace Book" her Aunt Pussie gave her, and
appears here as quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 729. The story of Eleanor
and her father's battered Bible appears in an unpublished interview with the Reverend
William Turner Levy, conducted by Emily Wright of the National Park Service and
is used here with the Reverend Levy's permission.

Corinne Robinson Alsop's memories of life with the Halls, of Grandmother Hall's
weariness, and of the Roser and Dodsworth dancing classes both she and Eleanor
attended all come from her unpublished memoir and an unpublished profile of her
cousin, Alsop Family Papers, Harvard, and appear here by courtesy of her son, John
Alsop.

The mysterious menace represented by Madeleine is recounted in This Is My Story
and a somewhat shortened version of it appears in the condensed version of Mrs.
Roosevelt's autobiography published in 1958. In the original version she merely "told"
her grandmother of her terror; in the later one she "confessed it," and I have used that
word in my account. The vigor with which her Uncle Ted greeted his favorite niece
is described by his wife on page 72 of Lash, Eleanor and Franklin.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth's memory of Eleanor's swimming at Oyster Bay is
from Mrs. L by Michael Teague, page 42. Edith Carow's much-quoted judgment of
Eleanor's dreary prospects is quoted here from Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 72.

The description of Mademoiselle Souvestre's physical appearance, of her erudition
and dramatic power, and of her rapid-fire discussion of art are all from the novel Olivia
by "Olivia," a pseudonymn for Dorothy Strachey-Bussy. Corinne Robinson's recol
lection of Eleanor's standing at the school and of the fondness of the other girls for
her comes from her unpublished memoir and from Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page
84; the memories of other girls who knew her are from his Love, Eleanor, page 27.
Eleanor's own thoughts on the rarity of honesty among women are quoted here from
Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 70.

The existence of the triple locks on Eleanor's bedroom door was revealed to me
by Laura Chanler White, who stayed in the room as a young woman and had their
purpose explained to her. Eleanor's sadness at having no real home is described in a
letter from Corinne Robinson to her daughter, Corinne, and is quoted here from Lash,
Love, Eleanor, page 36.

It was to her friend Lorena Hickock that Eleanor confessed in 1934 that she was
"locked up," quoted on page 1 of Lash, Love, Eleanor.

Debutante terror at the prospect of the Assembly Ball is quoted from Lash, Eleanor
and Franklin, page 92. Duncan Harris' gallant letter correcting Eleanor's self-
depreciating portrait of her popularity as a debutante is among the Eleanor Roosevelt
Papers, FDRL.

My account of the earliest days of Franklin's courting of Eleanor is based upon his
Line-A-Day diary and his mother's journal. Corinne Robinson's admiring portrait of
Franklin as a sailor is from her unpublished memoir, Alsop Family Papers, Houghton
Library, Harvard.

366 SOURCE NOTES

FDR's unconventional congratulations for all brides as well as grooms comes from
Grace Tully, FDR, My Boss. Eleanor's arboreal costume is briefly noted in SDK's
journal, FDRL. Her remarks about the contrast between her own sense of insecurity
and Franklin's is from her 1953 interview with Louis Eisner, FDRL. The friend who
described Eleanor's precocious gravity was Isabella Selmes Greenway, and is quoted
in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 105.

Eleanor's 1903 visit to Campobello is skeletally described in SDR's journal, FDRL;
Mrs. Hartman Kuhn later confided her early awareness of a budding romance to
Eleanor in a letter quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 103. Eleanor's visit to
Hyde Park and Franklin's first days back at Harvard in the autumn of 1903 are
reconstructed here from his and SDR's journals and from his letters to his mother and
Eleanor's responses to letters from him, FDRL.

SDR's anxious solicitude for the failing Miss Clay is noted in her diary, FDRL.

Eleanor's discussion of courtship customs is from This Is My Story, pages 109-1 10.

The fateful weekend at Cambridge and Groton is reconstructed here from FDR's
diary, FDRL. Late in her life, Eleanor recalled what she could of Franklin's proposal
and her own response to it to her close friend Dr. David Gurewitsch, who, in turn,
recounted it to Joseph Lash. It appears here as given in Eleanor and Franklin, page
107.

8: KEEPING THE NAME IN THE FAMILY

The sources for this chapter are largely the same as for the last Sara's letters and
journal; Franklin's letters and Line-A-Day diary; and Eleanor's letters, all at the
FDRL.

Eleanor's discussion of Franklin's resentment of the rebuff by Porcellian is from
her interview with Louis Eisner, FDRL. The scorn of his Oyster Bay contemporaries
is from Corinne Robinson Alsop's unpublished articles on Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt, Alsop Papers, Harvard.

Eleanor's explanation for her haste in marrying is from This Is My Story, page 111.
Mademoiselle Souvestre's counsel of caution is quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin,
page 90. Eleanor's memories of her first winter in society, her philanthropic duties,
her Uncle Vallie's mixed motives for his own charity work, and her delight and
satisfaction in work at the Rivington Street Settlement are all from This Is My Story,
pages 100-123.

The letter to the newspaper about Anna Hall's kindness was found pinned into
the memorial scrapbook someone prepared for Eleanor after her mother's death,
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

Eleanor's memories of Cousin Susie Parish and her somewhat restricted hospitality
are from This Is My Story, pages 106-107.

The drawing at Sara's request showing how she might be buried with her husband
is among the James Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.

Joseph P. Lash was the first to spot the aptness of Eleanor's interest in Candida;
see Eleanor and Franklin, pages 124125.

The story of Sara's visit to Joseph Choate with Franklin in tow first appeared in
Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady. Someone other than Mrs. Roosevelt evidently

Source Notes 367

told Kleeman of the incident and when she was asked about it, Sara said she had
"forgotten" the event until reminded of it.

FDR's sadness at not having his father present to see him graduate from Harvard
was recalled to me many years later in a conversation with his son, James.

Corinne Alsop's account of FDR's unheralded visit to Dark Harbor and his later
stop at Orange are from her unpublished journals, Alsop Papers, Harvard.

Mrs. Kuhn's letter to Eleanor is quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, page 105.

Franklin's careful attention to the selection of a ring at Tiffany's is recorded in his
Line-A-Day diary, FDRL.

My account of the Roosevelt wedding is drawn largely from the detailed descrip
tion of it in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, supplemented here by newspaper accounts.
Eleanor's account of her arrival at Springwood and Elespie's careful scrutiny of her
is from Alfred Steinberg, Mrs. R, page 54.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To list the subject of every personal interview and oral history transcript, the title of
every thesis and book and magazine article I read or consulted in the course of writing
this book would serve only to make a fat volume fatter. Items read merely for back
ground have therefore been omitted; everything that follows had a direct bearing on
the final result,

I. UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL

A. MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS CONSULTED AT THE FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
LIBRARY

Bye, George

Clemens, Cyril

Delano Family Papers

Delano, Frederic A.

Dows, Olin

Early, Stephen T.

Forbush, Gabrielle

Franklin D, Roosevelt Library, Inc.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Foundation

Freidel, Frank

Hackett, Henry T, and John

Hall Family

Halsted, Anna Roosevelt

Harper and Brothers

Hassett, William D.

Hickock, Lorena

370 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howe, Louis M.
Joseph, Nannine
Kleeman, Rita Halle
Lape, Esther
Livingston Family
Mclntyre, Ross T.
Marvin, Langdon P.
Mellett, Lowell
Morgenthau, Henry, Jr.
O'Connor, Basil
Perkins, Frances
Rollins, Alfred B.
"Rosedale Papers" (microfilm)
Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor

Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor and Franklin D. (reminiscences by contemporaries)
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers Pertaining to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as New York State Senator, 1910-1913
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913-1920
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as Vice-Presidential Candidate, 1920
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers, 1920-1928
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as President, Alphabetical File
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as President, Official File
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as President, President's Personal File
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Papers as President, President's Secretary's File
Roosevelt, James (son of the President)
Roosevelt Family

Roosevelt Family: Papers Donated by the Children of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roose
velt

Rosenman, Samuel I.
Schary, Dore
Secret Service

Note: The audiovisual section of the FDRL houses scores of photograph albums,
hundreds of thousands of individual photographs, and mile upon mile of film, both
newsreels and home movies. I have drawn heavily upon its collections, not only for
illustrations, but as a source for the sort of intimate detail about the world in which
Franklin Roosevelt grew up unavailable anywhere else.

B. OTHER MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS CONSULTED

Alsop Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Silas Burt Papers, New- York Historical Society

George Brinton McClellan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

Endicott Peabody Papers, Groton School

Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, New York City

Stanford White Papers, New- York Historical Society

Bibliography 371

C. AUTHOR'S INTERVIEWS

John R. Boettiger
Marquis Childs
Maureen Corr
W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr.
Hamilton Fish
Edna Gurewitsch
Edward Hermann
Mary D, Keyserling
Gerald Morgan
Thomas Morgan
Franklin D, Roosevelt, Jr.
James Roosevelt
Laura Chanler White
Peter White

D. ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPTS

Oral Histories, FDRL

Dickerman, Marion

Forbush, Gabrielle

Palmer, George: interviews relating to FDR at Hyde Park

Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor

Rosenman, Samuel I.

Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Transcripts, FDRL

Bell, Minnewa

Berge, Otto

Boettiger, John R.

Calhoun, Gilbert

Connell, Catherine, and O'Neill, Gabrielle

Corr, Maureen

Curnan, Archie H. ("Tubby")

Daniels, Jonathan

Dows, Olin

Drewry, Elizabeth B.

Entrup, Marguerite

Farley, Harold

Gellhorn, Martha

Gurewitsch, Edna P.

Gurievitch, Grania

Halsted, Diana Hopkins

Halsted, James A.

Harriman, W. Averell

Hoffman, Anna Rosenberg

Kidd, Gordon

372 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lash, Trude W.

McVitty, Honoria Livingston

Nixon, Edgar; Deyo, Jerome; and Stickle, William

Redmond, Roland

Roosevelt, Elliott

Roosevelt, James

Seagraves, Eleanor

Tugwell, Rexford G.

National Park Service Val-Kill Transcripts, FDRL

Berge, Otto
Boettiger, John R.
Corr, Maureen
Curnan, Archie
Entrup, Marguerite
Geilhorn, Martha
Levy, William Turner
Redmond, Roland
Roosevelt, Elliott
Wotkyns, Eleanor

I also consulted a collection of 3 1 transcripts of interviews with friends, relatives,
employees and servants of the Roosevelts, conducted in the late 1940s by George
Palmer and Fred Rath of the National Park Service, as well as others in the collections
of the Columbia University Oral History Research Library, on microfilm at the FDRL.

E. THESES AND REPORTS

Note: This short list does not include the considerable number of unpublished manu
scripts and drafts by FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, members of their family, and their
friends upon which I drew, almost all of which are to be found scattered among the
various manuscript collections at the FDRL. The titles of these are given in the notes
for the individual chapters.

Ferdon, Nona S. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Psychological Interpretation of His Childhood

and Youth. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1971.
Fogel, Nancy. Change in Hyde Park: Interviews with 24 People. Senior thesis, Vassar

College, 1979. (Copies of the tape-recorded interviews upon which this thesis

was based are on deposit at the FDRL; several of the anecdotes I used in the

book were gleaned by listening to these.)
Grant, Frederic D., Jr. Edward Delano and Warren Delano II: Case Studies in American

China Trader Attitudes Toward the Chinese, 1834-1844. History honors thesis,

Bates College, 1976.
Moody, F. Kennon. FDR and His Neighbors: A Study of the Relationship Between

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Residents of Dutchess County. Ph.D. dissertation,

SUN Y, Albany, 1981.

Bibliography 373

Snell, Charles W. Historic Site and Grounds Report Bellefield Mansion and Estate, Home
of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, Hyde Park, New York. National
Park Service, Denver Service Center, 1977.

Wilkins, George Y. A Report on the Birthplace and Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Prepared for the National Park Service, 1950.

II. PUBLISHED MATERIALS
A. BOOKS BEARING DIRECTLY UPON THE ROOSEVELTS AND DELANOS

Alsop, Joseph. FDR: A Centenary Remembrance. New York, 1982.
Asbell, Bernard. When FDR Died. New York, 1961.

. The FDR Memoirs. New York, 1973.

, ed. Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt. New York,

1982.
Ashley, Clifford W. Whaleships of New Bedford, with introduction by Franklin D.

Roosevelt. Boston, 1929.

Beschloss, Michael P. Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance. New York, 1980.
Biddle, Francis. A Casual Past. Garden City, 1961.

. In Brief Authority. Garden City, 1962.

Biddle, George. An American Artist's Story. New York, 1939.

Bishop, Jim. FDR 's Last Year. New York, 1974.

Blum, John Morton. From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis. Boston, 1959; Years

of Urgency, Boston, 1965; Years of War, Boston, 1967.

. Roosevelt and Morgenthau. Boston, 1970.

Boettiger, John R. A Love in Shadow* New York, 1978.

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. New York, 1956.

. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom. New York, 1970.

Burt, Nathaniel. First Families. Boston, 1970.

Busch, Noel. What Manner of Man. New York, 1944.

Carmer, Carl. The Hudson. New York, 1939.

Churchill, Allen. The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats. New York, 1965.

Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore

Roosevelt. Cambridge, 1983.

Daniels, Jonathan. White House Witness. Garden City, 1975.
Davis, Kenneth S. FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928. New York, 1971.

. Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts. New York, 1974.

Delano, Daniel W., Jr. Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence. Pittsburgh, 1946.
Dow, Dorothy. Eleanor Roosevelt: An Eager Spirit. New York, 1984.
Dows, Olin. Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park. New York, 1949.
Faber, Doris. The Mothers of American Presidents. New York, 1968.

. The Life of Lorena Hickock: E. R. V Friend. New York, 1980.

Flynn, John T. Country Squire in the White House. New York, 1940.

. The Roosevelt Myth. Garden City, 1948.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt (22

volumes).

374 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freedman, Max, ed. Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928-194-8. Bos
ton, 1967.

Freidel, Frank. Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship. Boston, 1952.

Geddes, Donald Potter, ed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A Memorial New York, 1945.

Goldberg, Richard Thayer. The Making of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Triumph Over Dis
ability. Cambridge, 1981.

Graff, Robert D.; Ginna, Robert Emmett; and Butterfield, Roger. FDR. New York,
1962.

Gunther, John. Roosevelt in Retrospect. New York, 1950.

Gurewitsch, A. David. Eleanor Roosevelt: Her Day. New York, 1973.

Hareven, Tamara. Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience. Chicago, 1968.

Harrity, Richard, and Martin, Ralph G. Eleanor Roosevelt: Her Life in Pictures. New
York, 1958.

. The Human Side of FDR. New York, 1960.

Hassett, William D. Off the Record with FDR. New Brunswick, 1958.

Hess, Stephen. America's Political Dynasties. Garden City, 1966.

Hickock, Lorena. The Road to the White House: FDR: The Pre- Presidential Years. New
York, 1962.

Hoff- Wilson, Joan, and Lightman, Marjorie, eds. Without Precedent: The Life and Times
of Eleanor Roosevelt. Bloomington, 1984.

Johnson, Alvin Page. Franklin Roosevelt's Colonial Ancestors. Boston, 1946.

Johnson, Gerald W. Roosevelt: An American Study. New York, 1942.

Kavaler, Lucy. The Astors: An American Legend. New York, 1972.

Kearney, James R. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: The Evolution of a Reformer. Boston, 1968.

Kinnaird, Clark, ed. The Real FDR. New York, 1945.

Kleeman, Rita Halle. Gracious Lady: The Life of Sara Delano Roosevelt. New York,
1935.

Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend's Memoir. Garden City, 1964.

. Eleanor and Franklin. New York, 1971.

. Eleanor: The Years Alone. New York, 1972.

. Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, Volume I. Garden City,

1982.

. A World of Love: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, Volume II. Garden City,

1984.

. Life Was Meant to Be Lived: A Centenary Tribute. New York, 1984.

Lesley, Susan. Memoir of the Life of Mrs. Anne Jean Lyman. Cambridge, 1875.

Leuchtenberg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. New
York, 1963.

. In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Ithaca, 1983.

Lindley, Ernest K. Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy. New
York, 1932.

. Halfway with Roosevelt. New York, 1936.

Looker, Earle. This Man Roosevelt. New York, 1932.

Lorant, Stefan. FDR: A Pictorial Biography. New York, 1950.

Ludwig, Emil. Roosevelt: A Study in Fortune and Power. New York, 1938.

McCullough, David. Mornings on Horseback. New York, 1981.

Mclntire, Ross T. White House Physician. New York, 1946.

Mackenzie, Compton. Mr. Roosevelt. New York, 1944.

Bibliography 375

MacLeish, Archibald. The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. Boston, 1965.
Miller, Nathan. The Roosevelt Chronicles. Garden City, 1979.

. FDR: An Intimate History. Garden City, 1983.

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1979.

Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Edith Kermit Roosevelt. New York, 1980.

Nesbitt, Henrietta. White House Diary.

Parsons, Mrs. James Russell (Smith). Perchance Some Day. Privately printed, 1951.

Partridge, Bellamy. The Roosevelt Family in America. New York, 1936.

Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. New York, 1946.

Rollins, Alfred B., Jr. Roosevelt and Howe. New York, 1962.

, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Age of Action. New York, 1962.

Roosevelt, Eleanor. This Is My Story. New York, 1937.

. This I Remember. New York, 1949.

. On My Own. New York, 1958.

. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. New York, 1961.

. You Learn by Living. New York, 1960.

, ed. Hunting Big Game in the Eighties. New York, 1933.

. My Day. New York, 1938.

. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hyde Park (pamphlet).

Roosevelt, Elliott, ed. FDR: His Personal Letters: Early Years (Volume I). New York,

1947.

. FDR: His Personal Letters, 1905-1928 (Volume II). New York, 1948.

, and James Brough. An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park. New York,

1973.

. A Rendezvous with Destiny: The Roosevelts of the White House. New York, 1975.

. Mother R. London, 1978.

Roosevelt, Hall, ed. Odyssey of an American Family. New York, 1939,

Roosevelt, James, with Sidney Shalett. Affectionately >, FDR: A Son 's Story of a Lonely

Man. New York, 1956.

, with Bill Libby. My Parents: A Differing View. Chicago, 1976.

Roosevelt, Sara Delano (as told to Isabel Leighton and Gabrielle Forbush). My Boy

Franklin. New York, 1933.

Rosenman, Samuel I. Working with Roosevelt. New York, 1952,
, ed. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (13 volumes). New

York, 1938-50.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order (Volume

I). Boston, 1957.

Schriftgiesser, Karl. The Amazing Roosevelt Family, 1603-1942. New York, 1942.
Sherwood, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hopkins. New York, 1948.
Steelholm, Clara and Hardy. The House at Hyde Park. New York, 1950.
Steinberg, Alfred. Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt. New York, 1958.
Teague, Michael. Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Garden City,

1981.
Teichman, Howard. Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longwortb. Engle-

wood Cliffs, 1979.

Trohan, Walter. Political Animals. Garden City, 1975.
Tugwell, Rexford G. The Democratic Roosevelt. New York, 1957.
. In Search of Roosevelt. Cambridge, 1972.

376 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tully, Grace. FDR, My Boss. New York, 1949.

"Unofficial Observer" (pseudonym for John Carter Vincent). The New Dealers. New

York, 1934.

Wharton, Don, ed. The Roosevelt Omnibus. New York, 1934.
White, William S. Majesty and Mischief: A Mixed Tribute to FDR. New York, 1961.
Young, James C. Roosevelt Revealed. New York, 1936.
Youngs, J. William T. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life. Boston, 1985.

B. BOOKS ON ASPECTS OF THE ROOSEVELTS' WORLD

u An Old Whip." The Delights of Coaching. New York, 1883.

Ashburn, Frank D. Fifty Years On: Groton School, 1884-1934. Privately printed, New

York, 1934.

. Peabody of Groton. New York, 1944.

Auchincloss, Louis. The Rector of Justin. Boston, 1964.

. Life, Law and Letters: Essays and Sketches. Boston, 1979.

Augur, Helen. Tall Ships to Cathay. Garden City, 1951.

Baedeker, Karl. Northern Germany: A Handbook for Travelers. Leipzig, 1904.

Beachley, Charles E. History of the Consolidated Coal Company, 1864-1934. New York,

1934.
Benepe, Barry, and Downs, Arthur Channing, Jr. Newburgb Revealed. Newburgh,

1975.
Black, David. The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont. New York,

1981.
Burns, James MacGregor. The American Experiment: The Vineyard of Liberty, New

York, 1982.

Cable, Mary. Top Drawer. New York, 1984.
Clemens, Clara. My Father, Mark Twain. New York, 1931.

Coles, Robert. Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America. Boston, 1977.
Collis, Maurice. Foreign Mud. New York, 1952.
Cowles, Virginia. The Astors. New York, 1979.
Cunnyngham, Arthur. The Opium War. Philadelphia, 1845.
Curtis, George T. James Buchanan. New York, 1883.

Dayton, Abram C. Last Days of Knickerbocker Society in New York. New York, 1882.
Downing, Andrew Jackson. The Architecture of Country Houses. New York, 1850.
Dulles, Foster Rhea. The Old China Trade. Boston, 1930.
. China and America. Ann Arbor, 1946.

-. Americans Abroad. Ann Arbor, 1964.

Fairbank, John King. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast. Cambridge, 1953.
Forbes, Robert Bennet. Personal Reminiscences. Boston, 1878.
Furman, Bess. Washington By -Line. New York, 1949.
Gardner, William Amory. Groton Myths and Memories. Groton, 1928.
Goldberger, Paul The City Observed. New York, 1975.
Graves, Vivien and Charles. Enjoy Life Longer. London, 1970.
Griffin, Eldon. Clippers and Consuls. Ann Arbor, 1938.
Grund, Francis. Aristocracy in America (reprint). New York, 1959.
Gutman, Edward. The Watering Places and Mineral Springs of Germany, Austria and
Switzerland . . . A Popular Medical Guide. New York, 1880.

Bibliography 377

Haswell, Charles H. Reminiscences of an Octogenarian. New York, 1897,

Hislop, Codman. Elipbalet Nott. Middletown, 1971.

Hone, Philip. The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851, edited by Bayard Tuckerman.

New York, 1889.
Howe, George F. Chester A. Arthur: A Quarter-Century of Machine Politics. New York,

1935.
Hunter, William C. The Fan Kwae of Old Canton Before Treaty Days. London, 1882.

. Bits of Old China. London, 1885.

Hyde, Alexander, with the Reverend C. M. Hyde. The Centennial Celebration and

Centennial History of the Town of Lee, Massachusetts. Springfield, 1878.
Jackson, Stanley. Caruso. New York, 1972.

James, Henry. Richard Olney and His Public Services. New York, 1923.
Liu, Kwang-Ching. Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China: 1862-74. Cambridge,

1962.

Livesay, Harold C. Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business. Boston, 1975.
Loimes, Emma. The China Trade Post-Bag of the Seth Low Family of Salem and New

York. Manchester, 1953.
MacCracken, Henry Noble. Blithe Dutchess. New York, 1950.

. Old Dutchess, Forever! New York, 1958.

Manchester, William, The Last Lion. New York, 1983.

Miller, Douglas T. facksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830-

1860. New York, 1967.

Moulton, Louise Chandler. Lazy Tours in Spain and Elsewhere. Boston, 1896.
Nevins, Allan. The Life of Henry White, New York, 1930.
Photoclub Bad Nauheim. Das Schone Bad-Nauheim. Bad Nauheim, 1956.
Reeves, Thomas C. Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. New York, 1975.
Rives, Reginald W. The Coaching Club: Its History, Records and Activities. Privately

printed, New York, 1935.

Robbins, Christine Chapman. David Hosack, Citizen of New York. Philadelphia, 1964.
Rogers, Fairman. A Manual of Coaching. Philadelphia, 1900.
Scoville, Joseph A. Old Merchants of New York. New York, 1863.
Sedgwick, Ellery. The Happy Profession. Boston, 1946.
Seward, Frederick H. Reminiscences of a Wartime Statesman and Diplomat. New York,

1916.

Simon, Kate. Fifth Avenue: A Very Social History. New York, 1978.
Tansill, Charles C. The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 1885-1897. New York,

1940.

Turner, E. S. Taking the Cure. London, 1967.

Union College. Union College in the Civil War, 1861-65. Schenectady, 1915.
Waley, Arthur. The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes. London, 1958.
Wexter, Dixon. The Saga of American Society: A Record of Social Aspiration, 1607-1937.

New York, 1970.

C. JOURNALS AND NEWSPAPERS

The New York Times has been my primary journalistic source, but often supplemented
by other New York newspapers, including the Graphic, Herald, Journal, Sun, and
Tribune.

378 BIBLIOGRAPHY

In addition, I examined issues of the Poughkeepsie Eagle and Courier, as well as the
College Hill Mercury (1850-1852), New-York Historical Society; the Grotonian
(1895-1904); the Harvard Crimson (1900-1905); the Hyde Park Historian; and Town
Topics.

D. ARTICLES

Basso, Hamilton. "The Roosevelt Legend." Life, November 3, 1947.
Cowperthwaite, L. LeRoy. "FDR at Harvard." Quarterly Journal of Speech, February

1952.
Crowell, Laura. "Roosevelt the Grotonian." Quarterly Journal of Speech, February

1952.
Davis, Kenneth S. "FDR As a Biographer's Problem." The American Scholar, Winter

1983/84.
Downs, Jacques M. "American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800-1840."

The Business History Review, Winter 1968.
Drexel, Constance. "Unpublished Letters of FDR to His French Governess." Parents'

Magazine, September 1951.

Erickson, Joan. "Nothing to Fear." Daedalus, Spring 1964.
Fabricant, Noah D. "FDR's Nose and Throat Ailments." Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat

Monthly, February 1957.
. "FDR's Tonsiliectomy and Poliomyelitis." Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Monthly,

June 1957.
. "FDR, the Common Cold and American History." Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat

Monthly, March 1958.

Freidel, Frank. "Roosevelt's Father." The FDR Collector, November 1952.
Gohdes, Clarence. "Driving a Drag in Old New York." Bulletin of the New York Public

Library, June 1962.
Kastner, Joseph. "Andrew Jackson Downing." Notable American Architects, New

York, 1981.
Kintrea, Frank. "When the Coachman was a Millionaire," American Heritage, October

1967.

. " 'Old Peabo' and the School." American Heritage, October 1980.

Martin, George W. "Preface to a Schoolmaster's Biography." Harper's, February

1944.

Pollard, Charyll C. "FDR Collector." Prologue, Winter 1969,
Potter, David M. "Sketches for the Roosevelt Portrait." Yale Review, Autumn 1949.
Potter, Jeffrey. "This Thing About Frank." The New Yorker, August 10, 1963.
Sill, Leonora. "Bird Lover of Hyde Park." Audubon, June 1955.
Straight, Michael. "A Dutchess County Boy." New Republic, April 15, 1946.
Tugwell, Rexford G. "The Two Great Roosevelts." The Western Political Quarterly

March 1952.

Weisberger, Bernard A. "The Paper Trust." American Heritage, April 1971.
Whitehead, James L. "A President Goes Birding." Conservationist, May-June 1977.
Wilson, Theodore A., and McKinzie, Richard D. "The Masks of Power: FDR and
the Conduct of American Diplomacy," in Makers of American Diplomacy,
edited by Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson. New York, 1974.

INDEX

Adams, John Quincy, 21, 78

Adams Academy, lOOrc

Adriatic, 123

agriculture, price supports for, 6

Alden, John, 66

Alden, Mary, 66w

Alexander II, Czar of Russia, 96, 13 In,

142
Aigonac, 63-64, 65, 70, 81-85, 96, 97, 103,

105-107, 114, 119rc, 174, 332-333
Allenswood, 294-303, 317
Alleyne, Cecil H., 26872
Allotment Commission, 36
Alpha Delta Phi, 237
Alsop, Corinne Robinson, 25 1, 260, 265,

289, 301, 308, 320, 334, 336, 337, 339
Alsop, Joseph, 4-5

America and the Americans (Collier), 221 n
American (Know-Nothing) Party, 44-45
Anderson, Charles, 144
Anthony, George, 1 1
Architecture of Country Houses, The

(Downing), 83
Arco, Count, 273-274
Arliss, George, 103
Armenia, 83
Army, U.S., 7-8
Arnold, Thomas, 171
Arrowdale, 79-80
Arthur, Chester A., 28, 29, 107
Ashburn, Frank D., 171
Aspinwall, Mary Rebecca (grandmother), see

Roosevelt, Mary Rebecca Aspinwall

Aspinwall, William Henry (great-uncle), 21,

32, 45, 55

Aspinwall family, 21, 37, 39, 44
Associated Charities, 154
Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn, 130-132,

137, 169, 220

Astor, John Jacob, 81, 130, 196/2
Astor, John Jacob, III, 14
Astor, John Jacob, IV, 169
Astor, Mrs. John Jacob, IV, 131?2
Astor, William Backhouse, 81
Astor family, 130, 168-169, 171
Atlantic Coast Railroad Line, 101
Atlantic Monthly, 92

Baker, George Pierce, 215n-216w

Ballantine, Arthur A., 2 3 872

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 54

bank deposits, federal guarantees of, 6

Bartlett, Charles, 23, 25

Bartlett, Mrs. Charles, 83w

Bauman, Sebastian, 15

Bayard, Thomas F., 168, 19672-19772

Beach, Moses, 14

Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord, 103

Beal, Tom, 228, 238, 240, 252

Beaufort, Duke of, 133

Bell, Ned, 248

Bellefield, 138, 139

Belmont, August, 38-39

Belmont, August, Jr., 172

Belmont, Caroline Slidell Perry, 38

Belmont, Frederika, 39

380

INDEX

Belmont family, 130, 134

Biddle, Francis, 183, 184w, 203

Biddle, George, 182, 189, 202-203

Biddle, Moncure, 182, 184

Biddle, Nicholas, 306

Billings, Sherrard, 187, 192, 337

Bismarck, Otto von, 6

blacks, 4-5, 46, 47, 54, 142, 154, 216w

Blaine, James G., 137

Blandford, Marquess of, 133

Blodgett, Nelly, 38 7 97, 112, 201, 246

Blodgett, William T., 38, 97

Blodgett, Mrs. William T., 38

Blunt, Silas, 28

Bobby (horse), 211, 214, 223, 226, 227

Boer War, 231-232

Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt (daughter), 9, 139

Boettiger, John (son-in-law), 9

Bommerscheim, Christian, 149

Boone and Crockett Club, 285-286

Booth, Edwin, 66n

Booth, John Wilkes, 6677

Booth, Junius Brutus, 66/z

Boston Globe, 230-231, 333-334

Bounty, 66n

Bowie, W. Russell, 239

Bradley, Charles B., 246, 247-248, 249, 255,

308

Brierstone, 50
Britannic, 268-269, 293
British Guiana, Venezuela's border with,

196W-19772
Brown, Lathrop, 190, 192, 200, 206,

213-214, 217, 234, 237, 241, 252, 253,

325, 327-328, 330, 339, 340
Browning, Robert, 265
Bryan, William Jennings, 233
Buchanan, James, 33-34, 45, 136, 331
Buckingham, Miss, 150-151
Budge (dog), 58, 113
Bulloch, Ella, 317
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 1 1 3
Burns, Robert, 39

Cambridge, 75

Cambridge University, 206-207
Campobello Golf Course, 229
Campobello Island, 115, 121, 160, 171, 203,

210, 212-213, 229, 244,253, 254,

334-335

Candida (Shaw), 326-327
Carey, Maggie, 96, 97-98, 104, 145w
Carnegie, Andrew, 39
Carow, Edith, see Roosevelt, Edith Carow
Carter, Evelyn, 310, 329-330, 335
Carter, Sir Gilbert and Lady, 329-330
Caruso, Enrico, 329?z
Catholics, 5, 63

Catlett, Fred Wayne, 3 34w
Celtic, 246-247, 268-269
Central Pacific Railroad, 53
Century Club, 49
Channing, Edward, 215
Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea

(Washington, D.C.), 2
Chesapeake, 75, 76
China, trade with, 67-78, 87-89
Choate, Joseph, 331
Cholmeley, Aline, 248, 249
Cholmeley, Hugh Arthur Henry, Lord, 248
Cholmeley, Winnie, 248
Christmas Sermon (Stevenson), 310
Church, Frederick, 38
Church, Nancy ("Nannie"), 84, 89, 91, 93,

105

Churchill, Winston, 1 1 1
Civil War, 22w } 35-36, 37, 88/z, 93-94, 95
Clay, Alice, 150w, 16172, 173, 257, 312
Clay, Henry, 44
Clemens, Clara, 148?z
Clemens, Livy, 148fl
Clemens, Samuel, 124, I48w
Cleveland, Grover, 124, 135-136, 166-167,

196?z

Coaching Club of New York, 129, 134-135
Coit, Henry A., 174
Coles, Mr., 64
Collier, Catherine Delano Robbins ("Cassie,"

"Kassie") (aunt), 10-11, 89, 90-91, 98,

117, 225, 227n, 247, 253, 258, 332
Collier, Hiram Price (uncle), 227w, 258
Colonnade Row (New York, N.Y.), 80-81,

87

Columbia College, 57, 132
Columbia Law School, 257, 335
Commerce, 67
Commonwealth, 254
Consolidated Coal Company of Maryland,

14, 32-33, 54, 55, 62
Coolidge, Calvin, 5
Cooper, James Fenimore, 92
Copeland, Charles T., 215
Cork, Marie, 42, 43
Corning, Erastus, III ("Ratty"), 164
Cowles, Anna Roosevelt ("Bamie"), 56,

57-60, 62, 65, 97, 168-169, 194, 197,

222w, 265, 274, 276-277, 278, 282, 293,

314, 327, 330, 338
Cowles, William Sheffield ("Mr. Bearo"),

169, 197, 338

Cowles, William Sheffield, Jr., 197
Cruikshank, George, 159
Crumwold, 138-139, 225
Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad, 14,

33
Gushing, Caleb, 88?z

Index

381

Dana, Charles Henry, 252

Dana, Frances, 252

Daniels, Jonathan, I77z-18w

Davis, Alexander Jackson, 80

Davis, Jefferson, 93-94

Davis, Kenneth S., 22?z, I57n

Delannoy, Adelaide, 66n

de Lannoye, Jehan, 107

Delano, Amasa, 66n

Delano, Annie (aunt), see Hitch, Annie

Delano
Delano, Catherine ("Cassie," "Kassie")

(aunt), see Collier, Catherine Delano

Robbins
Delano, Catherine Robbins Lyman ("Katie")

(grandmother), 62 t 63, 79-81, 84, 85,

89, 109

charity work of, 154
in China, 79-80, 90-91
death of, 175-176
and death of first daughter, 80
fiftieth wedding anniversary of, 175
infant FDR and, 1 14
Delano, Daniel W., 88
Delano, Deborah ("Dora") (aunt), see

Forbes, Deborah Delano
Delano, Deborah (great-aunt), 79
Delano, Edward ("Ned") (great-uncle), 69,

71, 74, 75-76, 79, 80, 84, 85, 88, 89, 93,

94,95, 107, 108, 217
Delano, Ephraim (great-great-grandfather),

66
Delano, Franklin (great-uncle), 81, 97, 107,

112, 113, 174, 218
Delano, Frederic ("Fred") (uncle), 10-11,

88w, 91w, 94,97, lOOn, 117, -119w, 160,

225, 258
Delano, Jennie Walters (aunt), 100-102,

111-112, 118, 223, 258
Delano, John (great-uncle), 88-89
Delano, Jonathan, 66
Delano, Joseph (great-uncle), 76
Delano, Laura (aunt), 94, 107, 113, 117-119,

140, 230, 263

Delano, Laura Astor (great-aunt), 81, 96
Delano, Louise (aunt), 80, 90, 96-97
Delano, Lyman, 312
Delano, Mary Alden, 66n
Delano, Mercy Warren, 66
Delano, Paul, 66w

Delano, Philippe (uncle), 84, 89, 91, 94, 108
Delano, Sara, see Roosevelt, Sara Delano
Delano, Sarah (great-aunt), 84, 89, 94, 105
Delano, Susan (aunt), 80
Delano, Thomas, 66n
Delano, Tilly (aunt), 258
Delano, Warren, I (great-grandfather),

66-67, 81, 85-87

Delano, Mrs. Warren, I

(great-grandmother), 67
Delano, Mrs, Warren, I (second wife of

Warren Delano, I), 86, 94-95
Delano, Warren, II (grandfather), 55, 61, 62,
63, 107, 162

in China trade, 67-78, 79-80, 87-89, 93

courtship of, 79

death of, 199

and death of Catherine, 175-176

eightieth birthday of, 174-175

FDR given seafaring relics by, 159-160

fiftieth wedding anniversary of, 175

financial difficulties of, 87-89

infant FDR and, 111, 113, 114

as invalid, 99, 174, 175

and marriage of children, 64-65, 99, 105

in opium trade, 70-74, 77-78

as parent, 84-85, 99-100, 117-118

political affiliation of, 63, 107

and Sara's courtship, 64-65, 105
Delano, Warren, III (died in infancy)

(uncle), 81, 84

Delano, Warren, III (uncle), 64, 65, 84, 91,
94, 96, 98, 99-102, 108, 118, 126, 223,
225, 258-259, 337

Delano, Warren, IV (cousin), 102, 108, 110
de la Noye, Philippe, 66, 84
Delta Kappa Epsilon, 234
Delta Phi, 29
Democratic Party:

August Belmont in, 38

James Roosevelt (father) in, 44-45, 52,
107, 166

Warren Delano II on, 63, 64
Depew, Chauncey, 138
Depew, Louis, 149w
Depression, Great, 2, 5
Dewey, George, 2
Dewsbury, Hester, 66
Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield), 103
Disraeli, 103

Dodsworth, Mr. and Mrs., 290
Doolittle (horse), 121, 226-227
Dor6, Paul Gustave, 202
Dow, Dorothy, 293ra
Downing, Andrew Jackson, 82-83
Downtown Relief Bureau (New York,

N.Y.), 133
Draper, Alice, 251
Draper, George, 336
Draper, Mr. and Mrs. William, 251
Dreyfus case, 204, 297
Droop, John Percival, 148
Dumper, Arthur, 150w, 174, 176-177, 225
Dutchess County Hunt, 144
Dutch Reform Church, 51
D. W. C. Olyphant and Company, 7 1

382

INDEX

Earp brothers, 170

Edward VIII, King of England, 211w

Eliot, Charles W., 215, 232-233

Elks, Benevolent Protected Order of, 154

Ellerslie, 312

Eilerton, John Lodge, 1 1

Elliot, Charles, 73-74

Emerson, Faye, 9

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 78

England and the English (Collier), 227w

Episcopalianism, 51, 64, 156-157, 191

Ericcson, John, 80

Erie Canal, 81

Eug6nie, Empress of France, 96, 143

Evans, Mrs., 285-286

Everest, Mrs,, 111

Everett, William, lOOw

Fairhaven, 78, 80, 86, 97, 105, 106, 159, 244,

258-259, 336
Fairhaven Academy, 67
Fala (dog), 1 1

farmers, price supports for, 6
Federalist Party, 19, 44, 78
Fellows, Laura, 102
Fenway Court, 246
Ferdinand Magellan, 4
Ferdon, Nona, 10472, 125w
Ferguson, Robert, 306
Ferncliffe, 14
Fillmore, Millard, 44, 82
Flynn, John T., 158
Foley, Mr., 150w, 174
Forbes, Charles, 198
Forbes, Deborah Delano ("Dora") (aunt),

61, 65, 81, 84, 87, 94, 98, 99, 103, 104,

107, 111, 112, 225, 227?z, 230, 244, 245,

258, 332, 337
Forbes, John Bennet, 79
Forbes, John Murray, 78
Forbes, Paul (uncle), 227w
Forbes, Robert Bennet, 71, 72, 74, 77-78, 80
Forbes, William ("Will") (uncle), 65, 94, 95,

99, 103, 107, 112, 227
Forbes-Morgan, W., 306
Foursome, 163
Frankfurter, Felix, 91 n
Franklin D. Roosevelt (Lindley), 201
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Psychological

Interpretation of His Childhood and

Youth (Ferdon), 104w
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, 31, 9 In,

158
Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence

(Daniel W. Delano), 88w
Freeman, Bishop James E., 1-3
Freeman, Mrs., 192
Fremont, John Charles, 45
French, Michael, 106, 107

Gardner, Mrs. Jack, 246

Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 187

Gardner, William Amory, 187-189

Garfield, James A., 107

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 31

Gaulladet Home, 244

Gemmell, Dr., 123

Germania, 115-116, 267

Germanic, 107, 262

Germany and the Germans (Collier), 227w

Gerver, Miss, 150w, 151

Gibson, Charles Dana, 61

Gilbert, W. S., 204-205

Goodhue and Company, 67

Gordon, Arthur, 247

Gracie, James King, 269, 270, 281

Gracie, Mrs, James King, 269, 281, 292, 318

Gracious Lady (Kleeman), 87w, 91?z, 104w,

139-140

Grant, Frederick D., 137
Grant, Ulysses S., 137
Gray, Dr., 219, 220
Greenough, James Bradstreet, 100-101
Greenwood Cemetery (Brooklyn, N.Y.), 57
Griner, John, 173
Griswoid, William, 37, 42
Grotonian, 192-193, 204, 205
Groton Missionary Society, 192-193, 236
Groton School, 119w, 163n, 169-174, 177,
178-194, 201-202, 203-209

athletics at, 184-186

civic and social responsibility encouraged
at, 192-194

punishment at, 183, 184
Grund, Francis, 19-20
Gull, Sir Cameron, 149

Half Moon, 160, 210-211, 253, 308, 310, 334

Half Moon II, 213, 244

Hail, Anna (mother-in-law), see Roosevelt,

Anna Hall
Hall, Edith ("Pussie"), 271, 289, 293, 294,

300, 302, 304, 309

Hall, Edward ("Eddie), 263, 289, 303, 304
Hall, Elizabeth ("Tissie"), 267, 269, 272,

282, 306
Hall, Mary Livingston Ludlow, 263, 271,

279n, 281, 282, 289, 291-292, 303, 332,

337
Hall, Valentine ("Vallie"), 263, 289, 290,

294, 303, 304, 305, 318, 332
Hall, Valentine G., Jr., 263
Hamlin, Charles, 165
Hamlin, Huybertie Pruyn ("Bertie"),

164-166

Hampton Institute, 193
Harriman, W. Averell, 189
Harris, Duncan, 306
Harrison, Benjamin, 137

Index

383

Harvard, FDR at, 214-218, 230-236,

237-243, 244, 245-246, 307, 311-312,

324, 333-334
Harvard Crimson, 11972, 216, 228, 232-234,

23872, 239-242, 245-246, 256, 311, 324
Harvard Law School, 32, 256
Harvard Political Club, 242-243
Harvard Social Service Society, 236
Harvard Union, 240
Hassett, William, 207-208, 21172
Hasty Pudding, 237
Hathaway ancf Company, 67
Haupt, Herman, 36
Havemeyer family, 134
Hawaii, annexation of, 187
Hawk, 234

Hawkesbury, Cecil Foljambe, Baron, 162
Hearsey, Mr., 29

"Heart of the Andes" (Church), 38
Helena, Princess of Holstein, 124
Henry Clay, 83?z
Hill, Raymond, 15672
Hitch, Annie Delano (aunt), 81, 94, 96, 98,

99, 102, 104, 117-118, 144, 154, 174,

201, 225, 332
Hitch, Frederick ("Fred") (uncle), 99, 102,

117-118, 174, 201
Hobenzollern, 229-230
Hollingsworth, Amnon, 253
Hone, Philip, 18, 19
Hoover, Herbert, 158, 207
Hosack, David, 20, 211
Houqua (Chinese trade agent), 68, 70, 73
Howland, Frederika Belmont, 39
Howland, Gardiner G. (great-uncle), 26, 33
Howland, Rebecca Brien, see Roosevelt,

Rebecca Brien Howland
Howland, Samuel, III, 39, 46, 48, 49
Howland & Aspinwail, 21
Howland family, 21, 39, 230
Hudson River State Hospital, 14, 122
Hunter, William, 70, 72-74
Hunting Big Game in the Eighties (Elliott

Roosevelt), 287??
Huntingdon, Collis P., 2 6871
Hunting Trips of a Ranch Man (Theodore

Roosevelt), 262

Hyde, Alexander, 23-24, 25, 26, 172
Hyde, Alvan, 24-25
Hyde Park:

character of, 49-50
FDR's burial in, 2-3, 6-12
Rebecca Roosevelt's burial in, 57

immigrants, 19, 49

inauguration, FDR's first (1933), 207

FDR's speech for, 5

first anniversary of, 1-2

public mood at time of, 5

inauguration, FDR's second (1937), 207

inauguration, FDR's third (1941), 207

inauguration, FDR's fourth (1945), 207

Institute of 1770, 234-235

Irving, Washington, 2072, 81

Islesboro, 334

Ismay, Sir Thomas, 123

Jackson, Andrew, 44

James, Henry, II, 241

James, William, 2 1 5

J & S Morgan & Co., 170

Jane (student at Allenswood), 30172

Jay Cooke & Company, 55

Jefferson, Thomas, 1772-1872, 50

Jefferson Day speech (undelivered, 1945), 8

Jerome, Leonard, 38

Jerome Park Racetrack, 38, 134

Jews, 5, 39, 55

Jockey Club, 38

Johnson, Andrew, 46

Junior League, 3 1 8

Kane, De Lancy Astor, 133-134

Keeley, Dr., 276-277

Kellogg, Frank, 3

King Philip's War, 66

Kipling, Rudyard, 190

Kittredge, George Lyman, 215

Kleeman, Rita Halle, 8772, 9172, 10472

Knickerbocker Club (New York, N.Y.), 285

Know-Nothing Party, 44-45

Kuhn, Hamilton, 244, 255

Kuhn, Mr. and Mrs. Hartman, 244, 245, 310

La Farge, John, 102

Lawrence, James, 115, 171

Lawrence, Mrs. James, 1 1 5

Lawrence, Bishop William A., 192

Lawton, Alexander T., 136, 167

League of Nations, 152

Lee, Carrie, 109, 110

Lee, Robert E., 93-94

Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 166

Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 5-6, 37, 44, 45, 8872

Lindley, Ernest K., 15072, 20172

Lin Tse-hsu, 73, 75, 76

Link Lord Fauntleroy (Burnett), 113

Livingston family, 16

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 233

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 99-100,

252
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 58, 135, 234, '

251, 265, 292-294, 306, 337, 339
Looker, Earle, 23772
Low, Abbot, 90, 95
Low, George Cabot Ward, 184
Lowell, A. Lawrence, 232
Low family, 71

384

INDEX

"Loyalty and Friendship" (Eleanor

Roosevelt), 302

Ludlow, Maggie, 280, 284, 291
Ludlow, Mary Livingston, see Hall, Mary

Livingston Ludlow
Lyman, Catherine Robbins (grandmother),

see Delano, Catherine Robins Lyman
Lyman, Joseph (great-grandfather), 78-79
Lyman, Mrs. Joseph (great-grandmother),

78-79
Lyman family, 85, 99, 106

McAllister, Ward, 131

MacArthur, Douglas, 7-8

MacCarty, Peter, 228w

McClellan, George Brinton, 43-44, 46

McClellan, George Brinton, Jr., 46

McClellan, Mary, 43-44, 46

McCormick, Robert R., 2 3 872

McEachern, Elspeth ("Elespie"), 53, 57, 106,

lllw, 114, 127, 341
Mclntire, Ross T., 1 59
McKinley, William, 216, 230
McRorie, Helen ("Ellen," "Mamie"), 111,

114, 127, 159
Madeleine (Maggie Ludlow's companion),

280, 291, 299
Madison, Henry, 138-139
Madison, James, 138
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 160
Mann, Katy, 272, 275-276
Manual of Coaching (Rogers), 135
Marcy, William, 34
Marie (governess), 48

Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua, 166
Markoe, Harry, 205
Marshall, Charles, 39
Mary Powell, 142
Mathews and Swann, 33w
Mearns, David C, 17w-18w
Memorial Society (Harvard), 237
Messinger, Sadie, 218-222
Metropolitan Club (New York, N.Y.), 49
Miller, Harlan, 150w
minimum wage, 6
Mint, 80

Minturn, Jack, 205
Mr. Picket Pin and His Friends (Collier),

227?i

Monon, 122, 123, 145
Monroe Doctrine, 196w
Moore, Mary, 225-226
Moore family, 142
Morgan, Gerald, \S6n
Morgan, J. P., 170
Morgan, Mary Newbold, 139, 156?z,

195-196, 250, 251, 307
Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 9, 186
Morgenthau, Joan, 9

Morse, Samuel F. B., 32, 44-45

Morton, Levi P., 312

Moscheles, Felix, 125

Mount Hope, 14, 15-16, 17, 20-21, 22, 33,

37, 42, 122
Mullens, Priscilla, 66
Miinsterberg, Hugo, 215
My Boy Franklin (Sara Roosevelt), 139-140

Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 41
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, 142
National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.),

1-3

Nemesis, 76
Newbold, Mary, see Morgan, Mary

Newbold

Newbold, Thomas Jefferson, 138
New Deal, 6
New England Watch and Ward Society,

189

New Moon, 160, 211
New York, University of, 26, 33
New York Central Railroad, 138
New York Herald, 276, 337?z
New York Museum of Natural History,

162, 176

New York Orthopaedic Hospital, 3 1 8
New York Sun, 251
New York Times, 38, 39, 47
New York Tribune, 251
New York World, 105
New York Yacht Club, 337
Niagara, 40

Nicaraguan Canal, 166, 187, 210
Nichols, Roy F., 34?z
Not So Green, The, 70
Nott, Eliphalet, 26-30

Oak Terrace, 263, 281

Oceanic, RMS, 81

Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company,

87

Oldgate, 222?z

Olivia (Strachey-Bussy), 297n
Olney, Richard T., 196?z
O'Mara, Mary, 164
Outlook, 233

Parish, Henry, 320, 327

Parish, Susan Ludlow ("Susie"), 282, 286,
319, 320, 327

Paris Universal Exposition, 96

Parker, Edward K, 109-110, 123

Paton, John, 268w

Patrick, Marsena, 36

Paul Jones, 79

Peabody, Endicott, 163w, 169-171, 173-174,
177, 179, 180, 186, 187, 188, 189-192,
202, 205, 206, 214, 240, 338, 340

Index

385

Peabody, Fanny, 170, 172, 180, 181, 189,

190, 206, 208
Peabody, Harold, 205
Peabody, Malcolm, 183w
Peabody family, 71
Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 124
Pegler, Westbrook, 877z-88w
Pell, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred, 115, 229,

255

Pell, Frances, 229-230, 251, 319, 335
Pennsylvania Railroad, 54
Perkins, Frances, 2-3, 9, 309
Perkins family, 71
Perry, Matthew, 38
Personal Reminiscences (Forbes), 7Bn
Pierce, Franklin, 34
Pius IX, Pope, 56
Plog, William, 7, 224, 226
Porcellian, 32, 234-236, 237
Potter, Fuller, 185, 208-209
Potter, Jeffrey, 209

Poughkeepsie Collegiate School, 23, 25
Pougbkeepsie Eagle, 23
Pougbkeepsie News, 136
Prescott, William Hickling, 50-51
Prinzessin Victoria Luisa, 229, 327
Priscilla, 247

Pruyn, Huybertie ("Bertie"), 164-166
Punch, 147, 192

Quincy, Dorothy, 252

Radcliffe College, 101
radio, FDR's presence on, 4
Rainsford, Kerr, 205
Ranlett, Captain, 92
Reid, Jean, 251, 318-319
Reid, Whitelaw, 251, 319
Reid, Mrs. Whitelaw, 318-319
Reinsberg, Miss, 150w, 153
Republican Party:

FDR and, 216

former Whigs in, 45

TR in, 195

Warren Delano II in, 63, 107
Revolutionary War, 17
Richardson, H. H., 102
Riis, Jacob, 193,231
Riley, Elizabeth ("Betty"), 169
Rittenhouse Club (Philadelphia, Pa.), 238
Rivington Street Settlement House (New

York, N.Y.), 318-320
Robbins, Catherine Delano ("Cassie,"

"Kassie") (aunt), see Collier, Catherine
Delano Robbins

Robbins, Charles A, (uncle), 117, 227n
Robbins, Muriel Delano (cousin), 163, 227?z,

250, 251, 313, 326
Robbins, Warren (cousin), 163, 227n

Robinson, Corinne, see Alsop, Corinne

Robinson

Robinson, Corinne Roosevelt, 56, 60, 62,
229, 262, 269, 281, 287w, 293, 296w,
305, 334

Robinson, Douglas, 262-263, 277
Robinson, Helen Roosevelt Roosevelt (half
niece), 133, 135, 169, 194, 212, 221,
222?z } 250, 251, 307, 314, 326, 333, 337w
Robinson, Theodore Douglas ("Teddy"),

229, 232, 307, 314, 333, 337n
Rogers, Archibald, 138-139
Rogers, Mrs. Archibald, 139, 225
Rogers, Archibald, Jr. ("Archie"), 139-140
Rogers, Fairman, 135
Rogers, Pendleton, 306
Rokeby, 81
Roosevelt, Alice, see Longworth, Alice

Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Alice Lee, 170, 265
Roosevelt, Anna ("Bamie"), see Cowles,

Anna Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Anna (daughter), see Boettiger,

Anna Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor (Eleanor) (wife):
Alice Roosevelt vs., 292-293
appearance of, 266, 293, 300, 306, 307,

309, 336-337, 340
art as interest of, 299
athletic abilities of, 296-297
autobiography of, 271, 280-281,

2877z-288, 294, 299w, 306, 316H-317*
in battle with fear, 269-270, 279, 285, 293,

305, 310
Bible of, 287
birth of, 265-266

childhood companions of, 290-291
confidence gained by, 298-300
in convent school, 274-275
custody of, after mother's death, 282, 289
as debutante, 304, 305, 318
Delano family hospitality to, 332-333, 337
Delano family opium trade and, 88/z
as devoted to father, 260-261, 266-267,

272, 278, 283, 284-285, 286-287
as disappointment to mother, 266, 280
education of, 274-275, 280, 289-290,

294-303
engagement of, 308, 313, 314-325,

332-338

in Europe, as child, 272-274
in Europe, at finishing school, 294-303
father's correspondence with, 283-284
and father's death, 286
on FDR and Porcellian, 235
FDR's correspondence with, 307-308,

311, 320, 322, 324, 330
FDR's courtship with, 306-308, 309-313
and FDR's earlier romantic interests, 255?z

386

INDEX

Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor (cont'd)

FDR's engagement gift to, 335-336

FDR's first meeting with, 266

at FDR's funeral, 9, 10

on FDR's restoral of public confidence, 6
8

in first visit to Algonac, 332-333

at Hempstead cottage, 270-271

humor of, 296

idolized by other students, 301

intelligence of, 307

legacy from parents, 288-289

marriage as means of escape for, 3 1 7

on mother's beauty, 265

mother's death and, 282

mother's headaches treated by, 280-281

in near-disaster at sea, 267-269, 285, 293

on New Deal, 6

religiosity of, 287, 298

and religious upbringing of children, 157

resentment of mother, 279-280, 288

on Rosy, 129

and Sara Roosevelt, 251, 260, 304, 312,
314, 320-324, 330-332, 342

sea feared by, 293

sense of worth gained by, 296

separations from parents, 269-270

at social occasions, 293-294, 302

as social worker, 318-320

solemnity of, 266, 267

stoicism of, 300

as surrogate parent to brothers, 283, 284,
290, 302-303, 305

teaching abilities of, 301-302

as theatergoer, 326-327

timidity of, 273, 279, 280, 309-310

TR and, 292

wedding of, 10, 206, 338-341
Roosevelt, Anna Hall (mother-in-law), 1 14,
263-265

beauty of, 264-265, 278, 340

as charitable, 318

and children's education, 280

courtship of, 263, 264

death of, 281-282

devotion to husband, 266, 288

Eleanor as disappointment to, 266

Eleanor's resentment of, 279-280, 288

health of, 280-281

and husband's drinking, 272, 276, 277
Roosevelt, Betty (sister-in-law), 1 1
Roosevelt, Corinne, see Robinson, Corinne

Roosevelt

Roosevelt, Edith Carow, 282, 292
Roosevelt, Eleanor (wife), see Roosevelt,

Anna Eleanor

Roosevelt, Ellen (cousin), 106
Roosevelt, Ellen Crosby (aunt), 47, 1 10

Roosevelt, Elliott (father-in-law):
brother Theodore vs., 261, 262, 263
courtship of, 263-264
and custody of children, 282
as devoted son, 262
drinking by, 266, 267, 271-272, 273-274,

276-277, 278, 286, 305
and Eleanor, after wife's death, 282-285

305

Eleanor's correspondence with, 283-284
Eleanor's devotion to, 260-261, 266-267,

272, 278, 283, 284-285, 286-287
as FDR's godfather, 112, 113, 266
generosity of, 261

health of, 261-262, 269, 271, 272, 273-274
as hunter, 262, 270
in near-disaster at sea, 268-269
responsibility avoided by, 270w
in sanitariums and asylums, 274, 276-277
separated from family, 276, 277-278
suicide contemplated by, 272, 275
as unsettled, 266, 267, 271
after wife's death, 282-286
and wife's death, 281-282
and wife's illnesses, 281
women pursued by, 272, 275, 285
Roosevelt, Elliott (son), 9
Roosevelt, Mrs. Elliott (daughter-in-law), 9
Roosevelt, Elliott, Jr. (brother-in-law), 271,

279, 282, 284

Roosevelt, Franklin, Jr. (son), 207
Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin, Jr.

(daughter-in-law), 9
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR):
acceptance sought by, 180-182
as actor, 204-205, 237
ancestry of, on Delano side, 66
ancestry of, on Roosevelt side, 16-21
appearance of, 110, 111, 113, 181, 204,

251, 253, 315
as argumentative, 203
assassination attempt on, 117
athletic abilities of, 185-186, 187, 202,

204, 213, 216, 229, 315, 335
birds as interest of, 160-163, 176, 319
birth of, 109-110

biweekly press conferences of, 117
books as interest of, 237-238, 339
burial of, 2-3, 6-12
in Caribbean, 325, 327-330
childhood discipline of, 126-128
childhood illnesses of, 122-123, 150, 177,

185-186, 198-200

as collector, 157-159, 160, 237-238, 339
confidence instilled by, 6, 8, 191-192
courtship of, 306-308, 309-313
death of, 3, 8
and death of father, 224, 225, 228

Index

387

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (cont'd)
as debater, 187, 203
delayed sexual growth of, 250, 315
diary kept by, 249, 251-252, 253, 254,

257, 307, 308, 313

disarming manner of, 164, 176177, 182
early experiences with women, 248-255
early family plans of, 253, 254
early literary efforts of, 163
enemies of, 4, 5

engagement of, 308, 313, 314-325, 332-338
Episcopalianism of, 156-157, 191
in Europe, as adult, 229-230, 246-249,

255-256
in Europe, as child, 115-116, 122-123,

146, 162, 176-177, 267
excuses made by, 203-204, 205
and "famous French lady," 328
father's health and, 145, 148, 198, 199,

211-213, 223-224
feelings concealed by, 249, 252
fire feared by, 117-119
in first electoral victory, 243
first encounter with tenement poverty,

319

first sorrow experienced by, 119
first vote cast by, 256
at Groton, 119n, 163w, 169-174, 177,

178-194, 201-202, 203-209
at Harvard, 214-218, 230-236, 237-243,

244, 245-246, 307, 311-312, 324,

333-334

as historian, 230-231, 237, 239
on honeymoon, 81-82
as horseman, 121-122
as hunter, 160-161, 162, 217
imagination of, 128-129
infancy of, 112-114
intelligence of, 113, 180, 203, 206
journalistic efforts of, l\9n, 163, 216, 228,

232-234, 238n, 239-242, 245-246, 256,

311, 324

leadership abilities of, 141-142
letters to parents of, 182, 184, 185-186,

190, 194, 198, 203-204, 205, 215, 218,

228, 237, 241-242, 245, 247, 248, 249,
255, 260, 322-323

as little Lord Fauntleroy, 1 1 3
marriage as means of escape for, 316
as member of ruling class, 5, 126,

142-143, 176
musical abilities of, 187, 192, 204, 205,

229, 259

naming of, 111-112
optimism of, 5-6, 8, 157w
as outsider, 181
paradoxical personality of, 8-9
paralysis of, 117

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (cont'd)

playmates of, 135, 138, 139-141, 148, 149,

190, 229

politeness of, 126, 149
popularity sought by, 149, 238-239
pranks played by, 153, 215
as the President, 4, 10
rejected as Porcellian member, 234-236,

237

resilience of, 237
sarcasm of, 203, 241-242
sea as love of, 159-160
shyness of, 114, 162
snobbishness of, 240
social conscience of, 152, 153-154,

192-193, 236

social skills mastered by, 216-217
as stamp collector, 159, 160
stoicism of, 145-146, 151, 256
as story teller, 240w
taste in clothing, 247-248
wedding of, 10, 206, 338-341
Roosevelt, Hall (brother-in-law), 274, 276,

277, 279, 282, 284, 290, 291, 302-303,

304, 305, 311, 330
Roosevelt, Helen Astor (sister-in-law),

131-133, 135, 167-168, 172
Roosevelt, Helen Roosevelt (half niece), see

Robinson, Helen Roosevelt Roosevelt
Roosevelt, Isaac ("Dr. Isaac") (grandfather),

20-22, 25, 33, 42, 44, 57
children's education overseen by, 23, 25,

26, 29, 30
death of, 36-37
Roosevelt, Isaac (great-great-grandfather),

16-17, 18-19, 44

Roosevelt, Jacobus (James), 16, 19
Roosevelt, James (father):
affection for first wife, 46-47
as Astor "Patriarch," 1 3 1
as attorney, 32-33
Bamie courted by, 57-60, 3 14
and birth of FDR, 109-1 10
business interests of, 14, 33-34, 47^1-8,

54-55, 62, 87

and canal in Nicaragua, 166, 210
childhood of, 21-26
civic responsibility and, 51-52, 122,

135-136, 154-156
Civil War efforts of, 35-36
courtship with Sara, 60, 62-65, 104-105
death of, 224
education of, 23-30, 32
as English country gentleman, 50-54
European travels of, 30-32, 33-34, 35,

37-38, 39-43, 44, 46-49, 57, 59, 96, 106,

107-108, 122-123, 146-151, 167, 176,

199-200

388

INDEX

Roosevelt, James (cont'd)

FDR protected by, 141, 142-143, 185
and FDR's education, 172-173
and FDR's illnesses, 123, 201
FDR's relationship with, 120-122, 128,

177

in Garibaldi's army, 3 1
grave of, 256-257, 313, 324, 326
as horseman, 52-53, 121-122, 211, 214,

226-227
Hyde Park estate developed by, 3, 7,

14-15
illnesses of, 144-145, 146, 198, 199,

211-213,221-224

infant FDR and, 110, 115-116, 119-120
as invalid, 145, 147, 212-213, 222-224
political allegiances of, 44-45, 52, 107,

124, 166, 195
in public office, 51, 107
seafaring stories told by, 1 59
and Taddy's scandals, 218, 221-222
wedded to Sara, 105
will of, 224, 228
Roosevelt, James (great-grandfather), 17-18,

19

Roosevelt, James (son), 120w
FDR funeral plans and, 3
on FDR's fear of fire, 117
Roosevelt, Mrs. James (daughter-in-law), 9
Roosevelt, James J., 3 3-34, 45rc
Roosevelt, James Roosevelt ("Rosy") (half
brother), 11, 13-14, 15, 34-35, 111, 155,
195,201, 307, 339
in Astor society, 130-132
as avuncular figure to FDR, 129-130
Bamieand, 168-169, 314
and children's education, 171-172
and death of wife, 167-168, 172
diplomatic career of, 136-137, 166-167,

169, 196-197, 331

as horseman, 129, 132-135, 137-138, 167
as parent, 197
with parents in Europe, 37, 40, 41-43, 46,

48-49, 56, 57
Samuel Howland III as childhood

companion of, 46, 48, 49
and son's scandals, 219
Roosevelt, James Roosevelt, Jr. ("Taddy")
(half nephew), 133, 135, 169, 171, 181,
192, 195, 202, 217-222, 223
Roosevelt, Mrs. John (daughter-in-law), 9
Roosevelt, John Aspinwall (uncle), 14, 23,

30, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46, 47-48
Roosevelt, Kermit, 236
Roosevelt, Martha Bulloch ("Mittie"), 36,

56,60, 62, 113, 265
Roosevelt, Mary Rebecca Aspinwall
(grandmother), 21, 22, 30, 36

Roosevelt, Rebecca Brien Howland, 13-16,

33-34, 53, 131, 212, 224
death of, 57, 213
with husband in Europe, 37, 38, 39,

40-43, 46, 48-49, 56, 96
on husband in politics, 52
illness of, 55-57
journal of, 15-16, 54-55
Roosevelt, Sadie Messinger, 218-222
Roosevelt, Sara Delano (mother):
affection for father, 89-90, 93
appearance of, 61, 106, 227, 304
birth of, 84

on Caribbean cruise, 325, 327-330
charity work of, 154

childhood of, 85-87, 89, 90, 91-92, 93, 94
in China, 91-92, 93, 94, 325
and death of husband, 224-228
and death of Louise, 96-97
and death of Philippe, 108
as Delano after marriage to James, 106
as dignified widow, 243-244
as disciplinarian, 126-127
education of, 93, 94, 96
Eleanor Roosevelt and, 252, 260, 304, 312,

314, 320-324, 330-332, 342
in England, 103, 107-108
on FDR as Roosevelt vs. Delano, 66
on FDR's academic achievements,

205-206
FDR's bond with, 110, 113-115, 125, 177,

228, 256, 260

and FDR's college associates, 223
on FDR's future in politics, 62, 1 24
FDR's governesses and, 151, 152
and FDR's honeymoon, 81-82
and FDR's illnesses, 123, 197-198,

199-200, 201-202

on FDR's relationship with his father, 120
FDR's selective candor with, 243
and FDR's social life, 250-251
Groton visited by, 198, 201-202, 205
honeymoon of, 106, 107-108
humor of, 22872
James's courtship with, 60, 62-65,

104-105
journals kept by, 124-125, 167, 168, 312,

326

musical abilities of, 259
in Paris, 61-62, 95-96, 103, 107
in political disagreements with FDR, 232w
pregnancy of, 108, 109-110
public image of, 61-62
rheumatic fever of, 95-96
on Rosy, 197

second pregnancy avoided by, 124-125
suitors of, 60, 62-65, 98, 102-105
on visits to Cambridge, 228

Index

389

Roosevelt, Sara Delano (cont'd)
wedding to James, 105

Roosevelt, Theodore (TR), 56, 230, 232, 338
ancestry of, 16

as assistant secretary of Navy, 194, 200
brother Elliott compared to, 261, 263
as brother Elliott's best man, 264
and brother Elliott's scandals, 275-277,

278, 286

as Eleanor's godfather, 265-266
FDR's admiration of, 194-195
on FDR's engagement, 337-338
at FDR's wedding, 340-341
as governor of New York, 195
as Porcellian member, 234, 235
speeches of, at Groton, 193-194

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 168w, 183w, 236

Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr., 36, 45, 56, 58,
231, 262

Roosevelt Terrace (Superior, Wis.), 122

Rosedale, 22, 37, 52, 62

Rosenman, Samuel, 240

Rosenvelt, Claes Van, 16

Rosenvelt, Johannes Van, 16

Roser, Frederic, 280, 289-290, 303

Rothschild, House of, 38

Royce, Josiah, 215

Rugby School, 56

Russell, Sturgis and Company, 67

Russell and Company, 67, 71-78, 93, 94, 99,
174

Russell family, 71

Rutland, Dukes of, 248

Sachs, Walter E., 240

Sagamore Hill, 194

St. Andrew's Boys Club (Boston, Mass.),

236, 319
St. James Church (Hyde Park, N.Y.), 1, 10,

11, 51, 57, 62, 122, 154-156, 167, 191,

226
St. John the Divine, Cathedral of (New

York, N.Y.), 133
Salerno, Joseph, 31?z
Sandoz, Jeanne, 150w, 151-153, 161
Sanitary Commission, 35
Santayana, George, 215
Schermerhorn family, 29
Schott, Dr., 225
Schuyler family, 6, 29
Scotia, 37, 38, 39-40, 49
Scott, Thomas A., 54
Seward, Frederick W., 29
Shaw, Alice Sohier, 252-255, 309-310, 315,

316

Shaw, George Bernard, 326-327
Shaw, Herbert Bramwell, 255n
Shays, Daniel, 24

Sherman, Florence Bagley, 275, 279n, 284

Sherwood, Robert, 7, 8-9

Sierstoff, Count, 272

Signet Literary Society, 237

Silliman, Benjamin Douglas, 32, 45

Social Security, 6

Sohier, Alice, see Shaw, Alice Sohier

Sohier, Eleanor, 252, 254

Sohier, William D., 252, 253

Soley, May, 250

Southern Railroads Security Company, 36?z,
54-55

South Kensington Museum (London), 176

Souvestre, Emile, 297

Souvestre, Marie, 294-300, 317, 318, 340

Spanish-American War, 200-201, 329

Springwood, 50-51, 52-53, 55, 57, 62-63,
90, 106, 115, 121, 138, 140-142, 144,
178, 202, 244, 257, 308, 311, 341

Stalky and Co. (Kipling), 190

Standish, Myles, 66

Stanford, Leland, 53

Stanton, Edwin M., 45-46

Steen Valetje, 81, 97, 230w

Steurs, Alphonse de, 97-98

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 310

stock market regulation, 6

Strachey, Lytton, 297n

Strachey-Bussy, Dorothy, 297

Sturgis, Mr. and Mrs. Russell, 115

Suckley, Margaret (cousin), 11

Surprise, 90-92

Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss), 126

Tally Ho, 133-134

Ten Lectures on the Use of Intoxicating

Liquors (Nott), 29
Teutonic, 201, 230
This Is My Story (Eleanor Roosevelt), 287w-

288w, 294

Times (London), 147
Tip (dog), 223, 224, 238, 326
Todd (butler), 211-212
Tombstone Epitaph, 170
Town, Ithiel, 80
Town Topics, 220-221, 227n, 309, 336-337,

341

Trinity Cathedral (Newark, N.J.), 174
Trohan, Walter, 23 Sn
Trollope, Frances, 20n
Troubetzkoy, Pierre, 245
Truman, Bess, 9
Truman, Harry, 3^4, 6, 9
Truman, Margaret, 6
Tugwell, Rexford, 157w
Tully, Grace, 308
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 2 1 5
Twain, Mark, 124, 148?z

390

INDEX

Underground Railroad, Tin

unemployment, during Depression, 5

unemployment compensation, 6

Union Club (New York, N.Y.), 49, 207, 306

Union College, 26-30, 32, 36, 107

Union Mining Company, 100

Unitarian Church, 63, 97, 170

University Club (New York, N.Y.), 49

Utica and Schenectady Railroad, 28

Val-Kill, 287, 293w

Vanderbiit, Cornelius, III, 254

Vanderbilt, Frederick W., 20w, 139, 211

Vanderbiit, Mrs. Frederick W., 211, 341

Vanderbilt family, 130, 134

Van Wyck family, 29

Vaux, Calvert, 82w

Venezuela, British Guiana's border with,

196w-197w
Vernon, Walter, 2
Verplanck family, 16
Victoria, Queen of England, 34
Voltaire, 189-190

Walewska, Marie, 41
Walewski, Count Alexandre, 41
Walewski, Countess, 41
Wall Street, 1857 panic on, 87
Walters, William Thompson, 101
Warm Springs, Ga., FDR's death in, 3
Warren, Mercy, 66
Washington, Booker T., 154, 193
"Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?" (Elliott
Roosevelt), 270?z

Webster, Daniel, 78

Wedding March An Eccentricity in Three

Acts, The (Gilbert), 204-205
Westphalia, 97
Wharton, Edith, 38
Wharton, Polly, 219, 223
Wheeler, Josiah, 15, 50
Whigs, 19, 32, 44, 78
White, Bessie Springs Smith, 104
White, Henry, I96?z
White, Richard, Jr., 102
White, Richard, Sr., 102
White, Stanford ("Stanny"), 102-104, 325
white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, 5
White House:

East Room of, 2, 6

FDR's first visit to, 124

grounds of, 82

Oval Room of, 117
White Star line, 123
Whitney, Hasseltine, 140
Whitney, Isabel, 140
Whitney family, 130, 134
Wilhelm I, Emperor of Prussia, 96
Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, 229-230,

234w

Williams College, 25
Williamson, George, 248
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 49-50
Wilson, Woodrow, 2
World War II, 7-8

Yang, Commissioner, 77
Yapp, William, 122

Europe he might easily have followed

"Taddy," his tragic half-nephew and
boyhood rival, whose scandalous private
life helped kill Franklin's father

Cousin Theodore the great TR
whom Franklin began openly to emulate
while still a schoolboy

And it tells for the first time anywhere
the story of Franklin's romance with Alice
Sohier, the beautiful, sharp-tongued Bos
ton girl, who spurned his offer of mar
riage and helped drive him into the arms
of his sympathetic cousin Eleanor
whose own girlhood, courtship, and mo
tives for marrying are examined in the
light of fresh evidence.

Before the Trumpet is a richly detailed,
immensely readable family epic, played
out on two continents and full of surpris
es. It is a tale that would grip the reader
even if its central character had not grown
up to become the most important presi
dent of this century.

Jacket design Paul Perlow
Author's photograph > Gary Green

Harper & Row, Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, N.Y. 10022

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